My First Google Gadget
Published on 8 Mar 2008 at 8:40 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under Biology, Birds, Coding, Gadgets, Inventions, Software.
I have just submitted my first Google Gadget.
It is called Bird of the Day, and it simply presents a photo of a new bird species each day. The photo is a public domain image from Wikipedia, and I link back to it so that you can get more information.
Here it is:
You can put it on your iGoogle page by clicking here…
I am going to write a few other versions that will complement my BirdPlanner.com site. The first will be a modification of the above where the user can enter their latitude and longitude to get birds that are present in that locale. That way people can prepare for their birdwatching trips.
I will also try writing one which is a Bird Identification Quiz. It will be a multiple choice quiz. I can vary the difficulty by sampling from birds of the same genus, from the same family, or from the whole set of birds.
This is a fun way for me to become familiar with the computational technology. The google gadget is just an XML file. The tag <Module> identifies it as a Google Gadget.
The remaining XML has three parts:
- <ModulePrefs>, which encodes the properties of the gadget.
- <UserPref>, which encodes the user information.
- <Content>, which encodes the content.
My gadget is pretty straightforward. There are no User Preferences, so I just have the first and last sections.
You can look at the xml code here. You will see that the workhorse of the content section is a php file that emits an html file. In this case the gadget simply holds a simple web page.
In the future, I will write more details about how all of this works.
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
Anita on 9 Mar 2008 at 9:22 am: 1
Super sweet! I’ve added to my iGoogle page.