Google Apps Hacks

146 GOOGLE APPS HACKS

HaCK 60:



You can add almost any functionality to the Google home page.

Helpful tools can spread usefulness and joy to others, and they can

even promote your web site.

As long as you have basic web development skills and you know some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript,

you can create your own custom gadgets from scratch. If not, you can also create a gadget using

Google’s gadget maker .

Broadly speaking, a Google gadget—also called a widget, or module—is just a small web page. It can

be a little helper tool, a Flash game, a special search engine, or anything else you can think of or nd

online. Furthermore, gadgets meeting certain criteria are not limited to being placed on iGoogle, but

may also be included on blogs or other web sites, or within Google Desktop.

Every gadget is made up of an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) document that denes its inner

workings. This denition can include all of its HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and so on—or it can just

instruct iGoogle to display information from another web page. Furthermore, the Google gadget

framework stores user settings for you, if you need them, and comes with additional JavaScript

functions you can use in your own code.

Let’s get started by creating a gadget that does nothing more than display the message “Hello

world, this is my rst gadget!” After that, I will outline a mor