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Over the past month or so I’ve been fiddling, on and off, with creating my own Google Homepage Gadget.  I’m addicted to my own personalized Google Homepage so which is why I got interested in the idea.  It turned out to be super simple.  To get started I did the default “hello world” gadget.  With that under my belt it was time to make something dynamic.  To make a long story short I created a ColdFusion page that outputted XML content using the <cfcontent> tag.  However that I had some issues with caching using that method.  It seems that Google caches gadget content for a day or sometimes longer.  After searching the web for a while I found no solution that worked for my particular gadget.  With my gadget I wanted to display pictures from my own personal web site and I wanted new pictures to show up each time the page was loaded.    Then it hit me… an IFRAME!!!  EUREKA!!!  Below is my code so far, it could be prettier but it works.

Photo_feed.xml

This XML page is the actual gadget page that gets loaded into your personalized Google Homepage.  It’s really simple, just xml page with containing HTML content, an IFRAME

Photo_feed.cfm

This page is the page that is included in the IFRAME code, it’s simple as well.  Just query the database for 4 random photos and display them.

Again the code above could be a lot cleaner, especially the photo_feed.cfm page, but I wanted to get this out there to give people and idea how easy it is to get started.  What are your thoughts?  Anyone else designed any gadgets yet?

Good Day!
Ryan