iGoogle Gadgets Beyond Google!: Plain Language Medical Dictionary

One summer evening many years ago, I was sitting on the front step with a friend watching the sunlight gradually shift from white to gold and dim. A bird landed on a branch overhead and bobbed briefly. I particularly noticed the underside of the tail, lovely pale green with elongated large yellowish or creamy spots. “Hunh,” I said, “that’s lovely. I wonder what it is?” My friend made a disparaging noise and scathing comment, “Just look at the six egg-shaped spots. How could ANYONE not know that’s a flicker?” I found out later that my friend’s mother had been an avid bird-watcher and he had grown up wandering the back roads in farm country soaking up everything his mother knew about birds. It was so fundamental and instinctive to him that he truly believed it was the same for everyone else.

Geeks and webmasters seem to realize that Google’s gadgets, widgets and games can be used on web pages as well as within iGoogle. Making an iGoogle gadget is NOT just for iGoogle! But most other people don’t realize this. This is one of those things where when you know something you don’t realize other people don’t know it. I thought if we posted the Plain Language Medical Dictionary tool on our web page that other people would realize they could do the same, just grab the code from our HTML. Not so. To rectify this, here is a little mini-tutorial on things you can do with iGoogle gadgets, and how, using our own Plain Language Medical Dictionary as an example.

(1)
Here is the Taubman Health Sciences Library page for our iGoogle gadget. It has a brief description with the gadget embedded and usable on that page.

Plain Language Medical Dictionary*:
http://www.lib.umich.edu/plain-language-dictionary
http://www.lib.umich.edu/taubman-health-sciences-library/plain-english-medical-dictionary
http://www.lib.umich.edu/taubman-health-sciences-library/plain-language-medical-dictionary
*It turns out we have three different links for this from different authors, which were sent to different audiences in the promotional content. While our webmaster is working on the problem you may need to try different links to get to the correct page. Our apologies! This revision made October 7, 2010.

(2)
Do you see, right under the bottom left corner of the dictionary gadget, a small oval button with a plus-sign (+) and the word Google? Click on that and it will take you to a page to allow you to put the gadget or widget on your iGoogle page. This assumes you have a Google account and an iGoogle page.

This link should take you to the same place:
http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/117948148600147758268/dictionary.xml&source=imag

(3)
If you click the big blue button that says “Add Plain English Medical Dictionary to iGoogle” you should then get a page something like this.

This image is of my own iGoogle tab for medical library stuff, with the Plain Language Medical Dictionary in the upper left hand corner of the groups of gadgets, right under the banner and search area.

(4)
You may have noticed that I had clicked in the corner of the gadget I wanted to access a drop down menu, choosing “About this gadget.”

(5)
Doing that, will take me to the specific page Google has for information about that gadget.

This link should take you directly to that page for our gadget.
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/117948148600147758268/dictionary.xml

(6)
On that page, on the far right, you should see a small section entitled “For webmasters.”

The middle link there, “Embed this gadget,” is what we want. Click there.

(7)
That will take you to a page where you can make choices to personalize how the gadget appears on your page – color of the border and size.

(8)
Click on the “Get Code” button underneath it, and then the code appears underneath, like this.

(9)
Here is what the code looks like. (WordPress does not allow me to insert the code or the gadget here, so my apologies for the inaccessible image version.)

There! Now you have all the info on how to embed our gadget on your webpages, AND you know how to get other iGoogle gadgets that might be useful. Enjoy!