G Friend Connect
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:
http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://1o4.jp/google/module/slim-reader.xml&up_mtitle=Slim%20RSS%20Reader&up_mfeed=http%3A%2F%2Frollerweblogger.org%2Froller%2Ffeed%2Fentries%2Frss&up_contentsnum=7&up_titlelink=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogleblog.blogspot.com%2F&synd=open&w=140&h=200&title=Blogging+Roller&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999&output=js">
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.
Posted at 04:07AM Feb 17, 2009 by Dave Johnson in Notes | Comments [0]