You do not need to be a super programmer to create gadgets for you and your friend’s iGoogle page. Now this method is not going to create any flashy games or show stock reports, but it is a fun way to share content with friends and family. If you have not yet created an iGoogle page it is very simple, just sign in with your Gmail login (or set up a new account) and get started creating content for the page.
To start adding content go to the link Add Stuff and you can browse through hundreds of gadgets based upon different categories and topics. Here is the example of the How-To Geek iGoogle gadget.
The first thing is to go to go to Google’s page to create your own gadget. When you get to the page there are a 7 basic templates where you just fill in a form and save to get your gadget. Here I am going to show the Free Form template. For this example I will be making a gadget for yours truly but you can customize yours for whatever you want.
Next enter in a title for your gadget and a link to your website or blog. Enter in your unique text, and choose the layout and background colors. You can then preview your gadget as you edit and make changes.
You can add a picture from your Picasa Web Album, Web Address, or directly upload from your hard drive.
This is the final product of my weekly tip gadget.
After you have created your gadget you will want to decide if you want to publish it to the gadget directory or not. If this is a personal gadget for you and your friend’s then you probably do not want to publish it. However, you can change that setting later if you feel the need. I am going to go ahead and publish this one.
To make changes to your iGoogle gadget simply click the drop down options menu and make changes. After creating the gadget you might want to invite more people to share it with.
This method is a basic and simple way to share content with friends, family, and colleagues on their iGoogle pages. In future articles we will go inside the Google Gadget API and learn to create some cool and crazy flashing gizmo’s.
In case you haven’t already seen it, my first guest post over on Lifehacker went live today:
If you are the type of person that likes to keep a lot of information stored in text-format files on your drive, you’ve probably encountered a scenario where you want to copy that information to the clipboard… so you open the file in notepad, select all, then copy to the clipboard. What if you could
By default when replying to an message is Thunderbird, the original text appears above the area to compose the response. Personally I am not a fan of this format. Here is how to switch it so your reply appears above the original message.
The single biggest irritation in Windows 7 and Vista is the UAC (User Account Control) system, especially for people that do a lot of tweaking. When you are trying to make configuration changes, it seems like every couple of seconds you are hitting another UAC prompt. Sure, it’s more secure… but
One of the most talked about annoyances in Windows Vista are the UAC prompts that constantly pop up when you are trying to make system changes. It’s especially irritating when you often need to run a particular tool that requires administrator mode in order to run. Thankfully there’s a simple hack
For those of you who are still in mourn over the loss video site Stage6 you are in luck as Vreel.net is coming soon! Vreel is essentially the replacement site for Stage6. Formerly called DivXIT.net (which surprisingly still points to Vreel) and gaining a lot of traffic; DivX inc. issued a cease
In this installment we are going to look at installing the Vista Ultimate toy DreamScene. Tired of the static pictures as your desktop? DreamScene allows you to incorporate video as the desktop image. This is a default feature of Vista Ultimate, however, with some simple hack files we can achieve
If you’ve ever needed to create a list of files in a directory, you’ve likely used a command from the prompt to pipe the directory listing into a file… but what if you could simply right-click on or in any folder and copy a list of the files to the clipboard?
Opera 9.5 was officially released today. I started to play with this version today and I must say I am quite impressed! Here is a quick how-to on importing your Firefox bookmarks into Opera.
We all know there are plenty of utilities that will reduce the amount of SPAM you receive in your E-mail inbox, but what about your snail-mail box? Sick of getting tons of credit card and other worthless junk mail? The Website proquo.com has a nice free service to help.
