Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The Anatomy of A Blogger Gadget

Blogger gives you the ability to add gadgets to your blog to extend its functionality. While there are hundreds many (what the heck - the big list of gadgets seems to be gone?!) available, earlier today I had an idea for gadget that I couldn't find implemented. No problem, I thought I'd whip up my own. I clicked on the Add your own link and...

...got totally stumped. In all my poking around the Blogger help site, I couldn't find any documentation as to how you actually code the gadget. I found this promising article - but it just explains how you can put code on your website that allows people to add specific content with a single click. While useful, it's not what a gadget is.

Finally I found this announcement which solved the mystery: to create your own Gadget, use the Google Gadget API. Well, duh.

Also in my search, I found these real life examples which are especially helpful.

I'm quite impressed with the API, it seems really complete.

Next up - finding time to actually write the gadget. But, now that I know the API they use, that should be infinitely easier to do.

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