Sunday, August 19, 2007

Google Gadgets API: what a pain!

So far I have uploaded widgets to three different sites:
- Widgetbox
- Widgipedia
- Yourminis
and I must say that the first time I uploaded a widget to any of these three sites it was not an easy task but not something out of this world, these three distributors are doing their best to help any developer to publish their widgets with ease, some of them have more steps, other ask for more information, but the requirements are not really a big deal.
However, Google Gadgets is different cup of tea. After reading many different pages from its documentation I still haven't managed to find out how to allow users to change settings to a flash widget; the documentation is just too big and complicated, many pages with many links that don't give precise answers or at least I couldn't find them...
I gave up trying to upload the clock from my previous post as it has some options to change the colours so I had to upload another experiment just as a test; after following their instructions and building a not too friendly xml file, I managed to upload a widget:



I still couldn't see if its in their library as whenever I look for its address I only get this error:

Sorry, http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/113526947643047156725/analoguecalendar.xml is unavailable. Please try another result.


well, maybe another day I will continue reading the dozens of documentation pages and I will manage to upload other widgets...

now, its time to go :)

salut!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What cool widget Ernesto! I do not believe I have ever heard of a Analogue Calendar. Ha! Guess that's telling a little too much. By the way, I have added you to my blogroll. You're doing a great job!

Gary Benitt said...

Ernesto - not sure if you're aware of this, but yourminis has premium functionality which will post your widget to iGoogle for you. Actually, we syndicate widgets to iGoogle, Live.com, Pageflakes, Netvibes and Facebook for our customers. This means that you only have to learn our API - and we do the rest of the work for you... ;) Probably not appropriate for one off widgets, but if you're getting paid to do the work, you can offer this added benefit to your clients... Let me know if you want more details...

Ernesto said...

Hey Russ, I don't know if you have noticed it but I've added you to my blog roll as well :P

Gary, I knew about the yourminis functionality to add widgets to iGoogle (and to myMashable :) ) & I will continue adding more widgets to yourminis but I wanted to try Google Gadgets directly as well...
Thanks for your comments

salut