In an earlier post I spoke of the official YouTube Google gadget, and the way it appeared in a Blogger sidebar. For those of you familiar with this gadget, you know that it displays 6 videos, yet the one I added to the sidebar using Blogger only shows 4.
The gadget was not magically transformed, nor is it a different gadget using different code.
It simply resizes intelligently.
Google gadgets that resize well are truly the future. When I discussed this with Adam Sah of Google he was very clear on this point. He also took time to point it out in his Google gadget session at the widget summit. I sorta understood the reason why it was a good idea in general before, but upon seeing the new Blogger feature, I completely and utterly understand.
Google gadgets that resize are not just a good idea, they are a necessity.
If your gadget is a static size, it will get cut off. Let’s look at that YouTube gadget which normally looks like this on an iGoogle page…
When it goes into the smaller Blogger sidebar it looks different…
Neat huh? It resizes (just coincidently) perfectly to this new environment. Blogger now having the ability to automatically add gadgets is big news for alot of reasons, but functionally, for developers there is no bigger news that the resizing issue.
Now let me point out something, Google gadgets are now ads too. Ad developers and planners need to know about the resize issue as well.
Now that the Blogger announcement has been made, I hope that the Google gadget API will include some documentation and guidance on this matter (for example how wide should Blogger gadgets be?, Tips on making a good resizable gadget… etc.)
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
220 pixels is an ideal width for a gadget on Blogger. This is the width of the sidebar in most templates. More documentation is coming.
I have a problem.
I can’t resize my gadget on sidebar.
The sidebar cut it off that it makes an additional frame because the gadget is too large for the sidebar. How I can solve this?