For one of my web developer projects, I’ve tasked myself with building a homepage similar to Google’s Personalized Home Page, now called iGoogle. I thought it would be great to provide various modules on the page, and that I could provide a custom set of modules based on audience.
Google has a nice set of modules, available for both iGoogle and the Google Desktop (which is part of Google Pack). These modules are called gadgets, and many of which can also be syndicated onto third-party websites.
For my homepage project, I thought about using a combination of custom gadgets as well as other third-party gadgets. However, in order to syndicate a gadget through Google, you have to provide gadget attribution back to Google. For a page with many Gadgets, this begins to look unprofessional.
That is why I started a project called whatsits. Whatsits are the same as gadgets, except I changed the name to differentiate between how they are served up. The whatsits project is hosted at Google Code Project Hosting.
The whatsits project provides a number of scripts that are used to take an xml gadget description file, and provide all the methods in order to serve up the gadget on third-party web sites, but without having to show any attribution back to Google.
The project is only one day old, but I’ve already been able to use it to serve a custom gadget up in an iframe. Currently, the biggest task of the project will be re-writing Google’s gadget javascript library, which I plan to do slowly as I need particular functions.
Anyone who would like to assist in the project can leave a comment and I’ll get a hold of you.