Great Gadgets and Wonderful Widgets

I write on Good Friday thinking I really should be on vacation from all things work related. However, as I am sitting in my pajamas with the radio on it's not so arduous a task. I have to go and represent the Village Plan Steering Committee at the Good Friday Walk this afternoon, so this morning is an a good opportunity to explore the final things.

Penny suggested the article http://tinyurl.com/dkyssu. This was an excellent introduction to gadget/widget environment. It provides a brief summary of the types of gadget/widget that are available: communication gadgets, social gadgets, utility gadgets and, of course the catch all miscellaneous gadgets! As yet I have not used the communication gadgets such as Google talk, Jaxtor, meebome or Sykpe. A number of the social gadgets looked useful such as Easy Comments and MyBlogLog . I have already tried out the Google Search gadget. Of the miscellaneous gadgets, I have already added Flickr and YouTube to my iGoogle home page. The article encouraged me to consider the individual functionality of gadgets and the environments in which they could be used appropriately. Following the blogs discussions on the separation of "work-related" and "personal and entertainment" pages, I feel in reality that any iGoogle page or blog homepage is going inevitably to be a mixture of the serious functional gadget and the fun widget. The gadgets can be a great way of organising effective access to the information you need but as the article says "there are many gadgets and widgets you can add" and this suggests to me that a judicious selection is required so that your iGoogle page or blog homepage doesn't becomes like any other disorganised drawer of paper clips, elastic bands, leaky biros, and other "whatisthisfor?" widgets!
Arranging the gadgets on your iGoggle home page or blog is of course a personal choice and says much about your interests and information needs. As suggested by the team I tried moving the gadgets on my blog around but as I discovered the blog template of which I was so proud back in Week Three (how long ago that seems!) just keeps moving them back!

Adding widget to display the tumbnails from my Flickr photostream was comparatively easy. My only reservation is that I didn't seem to be able to select individual photographs but just a certain number. I tried various options to get a subset to display but to no avail! I also found the display rather static. I prefer the slideshow gadget with which I experimented back in Week Four. If only I could get rid of the girl in the bikini!

I have also added the newsreel gadget to my blog. I was impressed by the ease with which it could identify and post relevant stories from the world of astronomy. I am not sure about the colours of the posting as they seem I little out of tune with my chose theme. I think I will go back and change them. I will also need to see how regularly they are updated.

On to the penultimate post ...