I’ve been looking into making my puzzles available as a Google Gadget. The process doesn’t seem too difficult – just a little unwieldy. Today, I want to talk about one small (but important) aspect of Google Gadgets: Views.
Views
Views are the “frames” (warning: implementation-dependent pun) that surround the rendered images of gadgets. There are several different types of views (e.g. “default”, “home”, “profile”, “canvas”) with different properties – primarily size. Different views are available in different “containers” (e.g. iGoogle, orkut).
The significance of this is that a gadget’s presentation must be tailored for the views in which it will appear; in particular, gadgets must be written to use an appropriate amount of screen space. If a gadget requires a large display, that display should be assigned to the gadget’s “canvas” view, with a special teaser view assigned to its “default” view.
Example
Here is an example of a (very) simple “Hello, World” app with a teaser view:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<Module>
<ModulePrefs title="Hello World!" height="100">
<Require feature="views"/>
</ModulePrefs>
<Content type="html" view="home">
<![CDATA[
<script type="text/javascript">
function GoToCanvas()
{
gadgets.views.requestNavigateTo(new gadgets.views.View("canvas"));
}
</script>
<p>Hello, world!</p>
<p><a href="javascript:GoToCanvas()">Canvas View...</a></p>
]]>
</Content>
<Content type="html" view="canvas">
<![CDATA[
<p style="font-size: 8em;">Hello, world!</p>
]]>
</Content>
</Module>
Future Work
I’m going to continue to experiment with widgets. I’m also experimenting with an increased ad budget. Here’s what’s coming up:
- More widget work
- Try to better position the aStore on the puzzle page
- Post some messages on puzzle forums
Weekend Stats
Stat | 17th | 18th | 19th |
---|---|---|---|
Visitors | 17 | 10 | 23 |
Visits | 26 | 11 | 24 |
Pageviews | 123 | 32 | 73 |
Pages/Visit | 4.73 | 2.91 | 3.04 |
Avg. Time on Site | 4:31 | 4:23 | 1:31 |
Okay – bloody awful. I’m trebling my daily ad budget; let’s see if the numbers move at all.
Follow Along
You can subscribe to my RSS feed, if you’d like to follow along with this month’s project, in which I attempt to create and popularize a puzzle site.