I finally switched to Windows Vista, and so far without any problems.
A thing I particularly like in Vista, is the Sidebar, and the Gadgets you can have there. It is very easy to create a gadget, it is just a tiny webpage, I read on many nerdpages, so I decided to give it a try.
And sure, it is very easy to build your own Vista Sidebar Widget.
In this post I will explain how I built a simple gadget that displays the 5 most recent post from the Beautiful Beta feed.
Now if you want to install the gadget, click this link.
Save the file to your desktop, and check that its extension is .gadget. If the file extension shows up as .zip, change it to .gadget. Doubleclick the downloaded file to install the gadget. From your Vista Sidebar, add the gadget.
If you want to see how it works, follow the next tutorial.
1. Check your local gadget folder
You can find the installed gadget by pressing [windows] + R on your keyboard, to bring up the 'Run'-dialog. In the inputbox enter
%userprofile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets and click OK. This will bring you to your folder with local sidebar gadgets (local means: only available to you, not to other users of your PC).
Now you will see your new gadget, it's called BloggerFeed.gadget
2. Examine the gadget structure
Open the BloggerFeed.gadget folder. In it there are 2 files and 3 folders.
The first file, BloggerFeed.html, is the gadget code, in html. Open it in Windows Notepad and examine it. You can see some familiar code here, calling the blogger JSON-feed for BeautifulBeta. If you like, change "beautifulbeta" to the name of your own blog to view your own feed.
The second file, gadget.xml, is called the Gadget Manifest, and contains meta-data about the gadget. This data is displayed in the Gadget Window when you try to add a new gadget to your sidebar.
The CSS-folder contains the stylesheet for the gadget, defining fonttype, fontsize, colrs, and so on. Not much different from your ordenary blog or website, isn't it?
The JS-folder contains the javascript-code for retrieving and parsing the JSON-feed. This code is also used in my Blogger Widget, a hack you have most likely used yourself.
The IMAGES-folder contains the icon (I copied this one from a standard Microsoft gadget).
3. Try it and modify it!
It is as easy as this. Please try it yourself, change the looks, or the blog, or whatever you like, and share your experience!
4. Things to do
This is only a first simple approach. Things I like to add to it in the future:
- Fly-out to display feed contents
- Setup screen to change the blogname and other settings
- Auto-refresh
Enjoy!
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