What can you do with plain old Gadgets?
Before I explore Google Friend Connect
, I'd like to see what you can do with plain old Google Gadgets. Specifically, I mean Google Gadgets for your Webpage, a subset of Google Gadgets that are can be added to places other than iGoogle, like this blog. These Gadgets are more limited because they must follow these rules:
- It cannot store state. For example, a syndicated gadget cannot be a to-do list that stores personal list items for each user.
- It cannot use the dynamic height feature. For example, it cannot get bigger or smaller depending on the amount of content.
- Its functionality should not be dependent on each user specifying different user preferences.
(From http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/legacy/publish.html#Syndication)
At this time, there are 62,419 gadgets that follow those rules. Problem is, those rules above are pretty limiting -- Gadgets that follow them cannot be very social.
How do you add a Gadget?
If you want to add such gadgets to your webpage, pick one from the Gadget Directory with the URL below:
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open
Pick the Gadget you want, make a couple of color and border settings and press a button to get the code to be inserted into your blog. For example, I picked the Slim RSS Gadget, got the code below:
Then you simply paste that snippet of code into the template that defines your blog, in the place where you want it to appear. That means you must have a blog that allows template editing and you must be comfortable HTML enough to find the right place to do the pasting.