Su Tech Ennui: Google Apps For Your Domain meets iGoogle at last!

Monday, September 17, 2007

Google Apps For Your Domain meets iGoogle at last!

As an early adopter of GAFYD I was rather disappointed with it, because it pretty much duplicated the functionality of iGoogle, but did so with slightly different mechanisms and a separate independent login mechanism - so I had *two* separate accounts with identical usernames at google, and it was hit or miss which google service used which authentication mechanism.

The most annoying thing was that iGoogle widgets were documented and easy(ish) to write, but GAFYD portlets were restricted to those supplied, with no documentation as to how to write your own.

Well, today I tried a crude hack, and it paid off. I don't know if this was always the case, or if they changed something recently, but it turns out that iGoogle portlets *do* work in GAFYD. All you have to do is ... select your widget and install it at iGoogle(which is easy, there's a simple button to do it at the iGoogle widgets site), then go to the widget on your iGoogle homepage and start as if you're going to share it. Don't share it by email, but ask for the URL to cut & paste. Then edit the URL to remove the front part which is the iGoogle installer, and keep the end part which is the true home of the widget. Remember to change it to http: instead of http%3A ...

Now go to 'add stuff' on your GAFYD home page. Find the small link at the top that allows you to add a portlet by URL, and paste in the URL you extracted from iGoogle.

Bingo! You now have your iGoogle widget running on your GFYD homepage, and if you need to, you can go and remove the first copy from your iGoogle page.

Now if only they would add the tabs :-/

4 comments:

G said...

Some useful related URLs:

Regular Google email, small:
https://mail.google.com/mail/x/

Domain email, small:
http://mail.google.com/a/gtoal.com/x/?btmpl=mobile

domain calendar:
http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/gtoal.com/m

add xml gadget to iGoogle:
http://www.google.com/ig/adde?synd=open&source=ggyp&moduleurl=http://www.gtoal.com/ig/xwordgadget.xml

add xml gadget to GAFYD:
http://partnerpage.google.com/gtoal.com/default/setp?et=tHgcSSbA&pid=gtoal.com&ap=&source=&prefid=&n_32=url%3Dhttp://www.gtoal.com/ig/xwordgadget.xml
- gives errors but does it anyway... (reload your home page to see the installed gadget)

Adria Richards said...

nice tip!

martin said...

Thanks for you tip. I've tried to solve the problem for me, but somehow I could not find out what you meant by changing the link. Could you please make an example.

Thanks in advance.

Unknown said...

This didn't work when trying to add a custom search: Not Found: http://www.google.com/coop/cse/manage_gadget.xml&source=imag