I finally got around to redesigning the site! At first, I was just going to use one of the ready made minimalist themes, but I wasn’t completely happy with any of them. What I ended up doing was stripping down and tweaking the default Kubrick theme that comes with WordPress and adding a little code to generate the navigation tabs. I’m probably going to be adding more to the footer over the next few days, like recent post links, recent comments links, and a search box.
Check out the new Ball Clock gadget. Watch the balls as they drop every minute to display the current time. The balls in the top two ramps represent minutes and the balls in the bottom ramp represent the hours.
The Disc Drop gadget has been overhauled. I updated the code to actionscript 3 and in the process made it a little more pleasing to the eye. I also made it so that you can modify the colors. Here’s the link to the customization page:
Here are the customization pages for the Stingray and the Pendulum Clock gadgets.
www.abowman.com/google-modules/stingray?edit=true
www.abowman.com/google-modules/pendulum-clock?edit=true
This is some great news for you web designers out there. You can now create your own themes for iGoogle and submit them to the theme directory for others to enjoy! You can even create dynamic themes that change according to the time of day.
Here are some links to help get you started.
Theme Directory
Developer Guide
Submit a Theme
Themes API Group
I’ve been reading through a lot of the comments this morning and noticed that some people don’t have access to all the options for their gadgets. Google has fixed that problem by adding a scrollbar to the options page for universal gadgets. Another problem that people have reported is that they see a 10-15px white border around the gadgets of Google Desktop. You should update or install the latest version of Google Desktop to fix these problems.
Now you can customize the spider before adding it to iGoogle or embedding it to your webpage.
www.abowman.com/google-modules/spider/?edit=true
The background image option is not working from the customization pages when adding the gadgets to iGoogle. It doesn’t seem to like the forward slashes and the semicolon.