Playing with gadgets

Widgets & gadgets done! I've been playing round a bit with gadgets through Google. I tried adding a couple of things to my blog which was OK. I found a very pretty fish tank which looked nice, only it added minutes to my page loading time so I deleted it pronto.

I also had a go at making my own widget through DigitalNZ. i found this to be really fiddly and not terribly intuitive. It took a lot of playing around to get it working. I've put it on my blog so if you want to have a play just go for it. It links into CCL's image databases.

Then it was onto experimenting with gadgets in iGoogle. If you've read any of my other posts you'll probably already know that I'm a fan of iGoogle and use it regularly. I set myself the goal of finding a gadget that was actually useful and looked good too. And I succeeded! See the screen shot below - I found a birthday gadget where you can see how many days it is to each birthday, have a small present planning list for everyone and the like. Its very cool and I think it might just stay on my pages. Fun fun.


So that is week 2 done. I enjoyed it a lot and found some new and interesting things to play with. I particularly like Google Reader and think I will keep on using this. Next week brings on social networking and info connect discovery which I'm particularly looking forward to. More on that next week!

Gidget Gadget Widget Wozzit?

Started doing my reading for the section on gadgets and widgets and at the end of my reading I was still a little confused about the difference between them. So with a little further investigation I found that a widget is a piece of reusable code that can be used on almost any website, whereas a gadget is proprietary and can only be used on certain sites. Confusing huh?!

I've used gadgets a little through iGoogle and found them to be mostly fun things like having a pet that you can feed or pat - fun for a couple of days. They don't usually last too long on my screen - that's some valuable real estate!

Now its time to have a play with some gadgets on my blog. Have a look and a play if appropriate. Next post will be about what gadgets I like. Exciting stuff...