aBowman

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.

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.

I added a “Release Fly” option to the tree frog gadget a couple days ago that allows you to feed your frog without clicking. You can set it to release a fly every 5, 10, 20, 30, or 60 seconds. This feature is nice for keeping your frog entertained while you work.

I am now using SWFObject to embed flash in my gadgets. This gets rid of the slightly annoying “Click to activate and use this control” prompt that appears when embedding flash in Internet Explorer without using an external javascript file.

Get over 1000 points on type-it and you can submit your score to this page.

Update: There is a security feature in the flash player that won’t allow scores to be submitted from any site other than abowman.com. I’ll fix that tonight.

I added difficulty levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) to the type-it gadget today and also improved the way the letters are launched so that they don’t overlap one another on the higher levels.

I created a typing game gadget over the past few days called type-it. Try it out and post your high score. Mine is 4085 on level 11. I’m thinking of adding different skill levels and also bonus points for levels that are completed flawlessly. A high score system would be nice too.

You can now add color to the Pendulum Clock gadget on iGoogle. The background, face, hands, pendulum, numbers, and lines of the clock can all have different colors. The text on the face of the clock can also be changed to say something other than aBowman.