aBowman » did you know?

Create Custom Designs for iGoogle

abowman — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:07:25 +0000

This is some great news for you web designers out there. You can now create your own themes for iGoogle and submit them to the theme directory for others to enjoy! You can even create dynamic themes that change according to the time of day.

Here are some links to help get you started.

Theme Directory
Developer Guide
Submit a Theme
Themes API Group

Got the Latest Google Desktop?

abowman — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:43:06 +0000

I’ve been reading through a lot of the comments this morning and noticed that some people don’t have access to all the options for their gadgets. Google has fixed that problem by adding a scrollbar to the options page for universal gadgets. Another problem that people have reported is that they see a 10-15px white border around the gadgets of Google Desktop. You should update or install the latest version of Google Desktop to fix these problems.

Edit the Widths of Gadgets on iGoogle

abowman — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 03:07:48 +0000

Did you know that you can change the widths of your gadgets on iGoogle? To do this, click the down arrow to the right of one of your tabs and then select “Edit this tab” from the drop down menu. You should now see this window:

This is making me think that I should add an option to the Tree Frog, Fish, Spider, etc. that lets the user set the height of the gadget. You could then fill one whole tab with one gadget or you could make some small square gadgets with the four column configuration.

Creating Custom Search Engines

abowman — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 03:01:16 +0000

Lately, I’ve been playing around with Google Custom Search Engines. All you have to do to build a search engine is sign in to their site with your Google login and press the “Create a Custom Search Engine” button and fill out the simple form. There are a lot nice features such as being able to create search engines with other people, being able to add your search engines to iGoogle or webpages as gadgets, and being able to link your search engine to an adsense account.

You can check out all the search engines I’ve created so far at my search engine page.

Personalizing Google Gadgets

abowman — Tue, 08 May 2007 11:15:16 +0000

I’ve been getting a lot of comments about how to personalize the gadgets on Google. Once the gadget has been added to your page, click the down arrow in the upper right corner of the gadget. You will then be able to click on edit “settings”.

This will show a form with the settings of the gadget. Once you are done making your selections, press the save button at the bottom of the form.

Google Desktop Bug Fix

abowman — Tue, 01 May 2007 11:21:59 +0000

The last version of Google Desktop had a bug that prevented users form being able to add universal gadgets by entering their address to the search textbox on the add gadget screen. If you have had trouble adding gadgets like the Fish to Google Desktop, uninstall the version of Google Desktop you have and download and install the latest one.

Google Desktop is included in Google Pack.

Some Gadgets Temporarily Unavailable

abowman — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:45:34 +0000

Over the past week or so there have been some problems with hosting some of my gadgets at Google Code. Today in particular I’ve noticed that a few of them have been displaying “Information is temporarily unavailable” quite often. Let me know if you have been seeing this and with what gadget. I have provided an alternate link for the fish gadget and will do so for other gadgets if I see that people need them.

Google is going to be applying some performance updates soon that will hopefully take care of this issue.

Bandwidth Exceeded on Google Pages :(

abowman — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 03:25:32 +0000

It looks like most of my Google Gadgets are temporarily unavailable due to my exceeding the bandwidth allowed by Google Pages. I wish that there was a bandwidth meter available so that I could have seen this coming. I’m going to have to find another place to host my gadgets.

Update: If any of the google gadgets are not working for you, you should be able to get them working again by adding them to your page from this site. This will retrieve the gadget from the new location.

Web Pages on your Desktop Background

abowman — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 12:44:01 +0000

In Windows, you can embed resizable web pages to your desktop background by following this procedure:

Right-click on your desktop and select Properties.
Click on the Desktop tab.
Press the Customize Desktop button.
Click the Web tab.
Press the New button.
Enter a web page address to the location textbox.