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February 18, 2008

Add Full Web Pages to iGoogle

If you don't find appropriate iGoogle gadgets for your favorite web sites, there's a way to create tabs that include these sites in iframes. Michael Bolin, from Google, created a gadget that loads almost any web page. Before adding the gadget, it's recommended to create a new iGoogle tab, but don't forget to uncheck the "I'm feeling lucky" option that populates the tab with gadgets. If you add the gadget to an existing tab, all the current gadgets will be hidden and they'll be visible again after you delete it.

The gadget loads by default Google Calendar's homepage, but you can change the URL from the settings: click on the small arrow from the gadget's title bar and select "Edit settings".


Another useful gadget has a rich text editor and you can use it to create content or to paste code from other pages (like Yahoo Video's embeddable code).


iGoogle should have more bare bones containers that can be filled with user's content: HTML code, web pages, dynamic images or structured data and add them to the gadget creator page.

19 comments:

  1. Go figure, we created something very similar for the book Google Apps Hacks a couple of months back.

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  2. where do i get the 'your page here' gadget as it does not show up on igoogle gadget search?

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  3. Thank you very much for posting these two incredibly useful items.

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  4. When you add certain pages it forces the iGoogle window to open as the new page instead of staying in the iGoogle tab. I successfully added notebook.google.com but when I tried to add docs.google.com it took over the page leaving iGoogle inaccessible. The same thing happened with Hotmail. For the pages it worked with it's great. Any suggestions on making it work for all pages?

    Curtis

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  5. @Curtis:
    Some pages don't like to be used inside iframes. It's actually very easy to add some code that removes your page from an iframe. You can test if a page can be added inside an iframe at W3School (edit the src value and click on the value) or by writing a simple HTML page.

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  6. @Curtis
    I did stumble over this. I've now a tab that, if it is activated, opens a site in the same browsertab. This means that whenever I go to my iGoogle page this ig-tab will be shown first thus the framed page will take over. How can I get rid of this page?

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  7. It's easy to remove the gadget, the tab or to edit the gadget's settings. Go to iGoogle and press Escape after the page starts to load. The iframe is loaded after iGoogle loads, so you'll have plenty of time to press Escape. If this doesn't work, clear your cache and repeat the procedure.

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  8. Thank you very much for posting these two incredibly useful items...

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  9. Anyone managed to get their Google Analytics in there?
    How so?

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  10. I used to use iGoogle but then thought that it lacks in content I would like to see on my homepage. This idea is great though and I think I will give it a go. Are there any limits as to what type of webpages you can display?

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  11. Doesn't work anymore!

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  12. Hey no worky anymore, what gives?!?!

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  13. Can't add any web page to igoogle.

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  14. Does anyone know a way to do this now?

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