How to get global services in my portal?

Question

I use IGoogle component inettuts to make my portal more attractive and easy to use interface.

I make many advanced features , but i face two problems :

• I don't know how to get global services like weather , date and time , quotes, my email.(Does i need to use some API?)
• How can i implement maximizing and restoring the widget

Answer 1

The inettuts code simply mimic's the behavior of the widgets on iGoogle. For each widget you would have to code it yourself, but that should be fairly simple.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/foryourpage/index.html is probably a good starting point.

Answer 2

• As far as the global services go, you will need a server side interface which will call various api's. E.g. for weather you can use http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/02/08/googles-secret-weather-api/ or http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/ . For date and time you can simply use javascript, I am not entirely sure what you mean with quotes, and for mail you will probably want to use something along the lines of http://php.net/manual/en/book.imap.php if you're using php.
• As far as maximizing and restoring the widget goes I would advice you to throw the inettuts code out of the window and rewrite it yourself, because their code doesn't support it and building it into it will be fairly complicated.

Hope that clears it up a bit. Oh and, Nick is absolutely right that inettuts code has nothing to do with igoogle as far as we can see.