Google Gadgets for the Snowden Library

I was finally able to get my catalog gadget to work yesterday. It will not go to Aquabrowser, our catalog interface, but it goes to our "classic" catalog. Which is fine. If I had thought of that earlier, I could have done this a while ago. To create a gadget, you just go to the Google Gadgets editor and cut and paste HTML code inside the "" tag. The trick is that you can't have code that needs scripts in the header. It's very easy to do, and the editor allows you to preview before you go into publishing and stuff.

Links to my gadgets can be found here: http://snowdenatlyco.blogspot.com/

You do have to add some "attributes" in the ModulePrefs tag such as author and e-mail before you can publish. You can just e-mail me at snyderm@lycoming.edu and I will send you my code so you can see what it should look like.

Now it is time to convince faculty they really need iGoogle. I hope that will get people to look at the library's blog through an RSS feed, so I see this as accomplishing multiple goals.

Google Gadgets

I have spent a large part of the morning working on a Google gadget for our catalog. I had a really nice response from Priscilla Finley of the University of Las Vegas about how easy they were to create. I went back and cut and pasted the HTML code from our Web site into the editor and got it to look beautiful, but clicking on "Search" makes the words disappear and you just stay where you were. Our code involves some Javascript in the header and I don't know how to add that in. I did add it, but since there's no "head", I think that is the problem.

We have code for a quicksearch box with Reference Universe that does not have that script in the header, I think I'll try to make a gadget for that...

It's been an emotional morning.