Create Your Own Google Gadget To Display Latest Post Of Your Blog

Posted on May 18, 2009, 5:10 pm, by abhinab choudhury.

If you have a website/blog and want to create an awesome tool for it, then I have a great tutorial for you today. In this tutorial I am going to tell you, how you can create your own Google Gadget to display latest posts of your blog in the sidebar of Desktop. Lets not waste any time and start the tutorial.

Requirements :

A good text editor. Wordpad is recommended
A Blog
1st and 2nd both. :d

Tutorial :

I have divided this tutorial in 2 parts :

Editing
Compiling

Editing :

First download the set of files that you will require to build up your first Google Gadget. Click here to download the files. I have put this files in rar format and you will need Winrar to extract it. You can download Winrar from here. Below is the list of files you will get after extracting :

default folder
editme folder
en folder
utils_js
gadget.gg file
icon_large.png image file
icon_small image file
main.js file
main.xml document

Now I believe that you have all the 9 files and folder in your hard disk. What you do is, put all the above 9 things in a new folder and name it anything, say MyfirstGadget. Now follow the steps below :

Step1. First open editme folder. In this folder you will see 2 files :

config_constants
entry_item_impl

We will deal with these two files, one by one.

Config_Constants :

Right click on this file and open it with Wordpad. Here press ctrl+F and search for http://feeds.feedburner.com/84productions. Change this link to your own feed URL and press Ctrl+S to save the document.

entry_item_impl :

Leave this file as it is, there is nothing to edit in this file.

Step2. Now open en Folder and right click on Strings file and again open it with Wordpad. We have to edit this whole file, follow the steps below :

a. At the top, change the Gadget Name from BeepTheGeek to your own desired name.

b. In the same way, change the Gadget Description also.

c. The same goes for Gadget About Text.

d. After editing three things, do not forget to change the Title Text from BeepTheGeek to your own text at the bottom. Have a look :

click on the image to enlarge

e. Now press Ctrl+S, to save the document.

The editing part is done. Now we have to compile this Google Gadget, to add this Gadget to our desktop.

Compiling :

To create Google Gadget we will need a tool called Google Desktop SDK, you can download this tool free from here.

After downloading this tool. Open the GD_SDK folder. In it, click on api >> tools. In tools folder open the designer_en.exe file.

In the Google Desktop Gadget Designer, click on File at the top and select Open Gadget.

Now navigate to the MyfirstGadget folder that you created in the beginning. Here select the Gadget file and click Open.

Have a look :

After opening Gadget file, simply hit F7 from Keyboard and you will get an alert saying :

Successfully created C:/——————-gadgetname.gg

Woo, you have created your Google Gadget successfully that will display your latest posts.

If you are facing any problem in understanding this tutorial feel free to drop comments.