My Goal: To make a PokerDIY user profile Google Gadget (and many more – like Event/Group detail gadgets) which can be put on any website/iGoogle/Gadget-supporting site (Facebook) etc.
Question: What is the best way of doing this.
Ok, I have read up on the Google site on how to make a gadget and all it seems to be is an XML document with the HTML you want to output. I am not 100% sure on how to do this, so I thought I would start this discussion on the best way of achieving my aim. So, the way I see it working is that the gadget will have user settings that a user can configure. The simplest parameter would be the UserID (ultimately it would be nice to put in Username but lets start simple). I then call a page on my server and retrieve the profile for that ID and pump out an XML file with the HTML encapsulated in the middle.
The question is – what is the best way of doing this last step (making the Gadget seems to be the easy bit) – I could use a HTTPHandler that takes in a querystring param (much like my ImageHandler - http://www.pokerdiy.com/DesktopModules/Smart-Thinker%20-%20UserProfile/Profile.ashx?id=1&w=50&h=50) but the syntax is very messy. I would imagine the other way of doing this would be to call a WebService – possibly using Michael Washington’s IWeb? I have not yet used this.
You can see my simple attempt here - http://www.pokerdiy.com/iG-PokerDIY-PokerLeague.xml This just shows my profile pic from PokerDIY (it is a static XML file in the root of my webserver)
So… has anyone done this? What is the best/neatest way of pumping out an XML response with encapsulated HTML (caching is also a concern to me, but I think Google handles the caching of the XML response on their servers).
FYI: Some good guides on GG (actually really simple):
http://www.seoish.com/how-to-make-google-gadgets