Web Biz

    Yesterday I finished working on the Google gadget for this blog, which allows you to view the latest articles posted.  Creating the gadget was straight forward and easy to test using Google’s developer gadget and developer notes.  They provide all the documentation necessary to design and create a gadget using a variety of JavaScript functions embedded into an XML file.  Google also provides several user interface elements for use in the gadget including tabs, mini messages, analytics tracking, dynamic height, and drag-and-drop functionality.  They also provide some core JavaScript functions that make coding the gadget easier, including a utility method called ‘_gel’ that is similar to Prototype’s $() method as a shortcut to the standard document.getElementById() method. 

    The only user interface element that I could not find any information on is the ability to easily toggle the display of the items in your gadget.  If you add a feed URL as a gadget to your personalized homepage you will notice the +/- graphic that allows you to expand/collapse each item in the feed channel.  Digging into the functionality a little deeper you’ll notice that this is accomplished using _IG_FR_toggle method.  However, there is not documentation available for this method, nor could I find anyone else who has attempted to use this method to toggle items within a Google gadget.  So, I wrote some simple toggle functions myself that would accomplish this user interface element without using Google’s code libraries.  It is rather unfortunate that this capability exists but isn’t available to gadget developers.

    In the meantime, be sure to add the new Web Biz Google gadget to your personalized homepage, or to your site.  I have also made the xml code publicly available for download if you’re interested to see how I created the gadget.