Gadget FeedAfter explaining this process several times, and looking over the search terms that have led people to my article on making Google Gadgets, I’ve decided to answer this question once and for all. Turning a supported feed (Atom 0.3 or 1.0, or RSS 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, or 2.0) into a simple Google Gadget is trivially easy, and can be done in a few simple steps.

  1. Make sure you’re logged in to your Google Personalized Homepage (iGoogle) account, then go to Google’s Personalized Homepage Content Directory
  2. Click the add by URL link that appears to the left of the search button near the top of the page
  3. Enter your feed address in the text box that appears and click the add button.

That’s it. If you return to your personalized homepage the latest items from your feed should appear as a new gadget. By default three items are displayed, but you can show additional items by clicking the arrow near the top right corner and selecting edit settings. More information on how to create a feed for your site, how to add a thumbnail image to your feed, etc. can be found in Google’s Information Publisher’s FAQ.

I suspect that what most people really want to know is how to get their feed to show up in the Google Gadget content directory. Again, the answer is pretty simple, but it may not be what you want to hear. Google will only add a Gadget to the content directory if it has a “critical mass” of users. They don’t specify how many users are required, but from my experience it seems like a dozen or so users are enough to get the Gadget to appear in search results. Having your gadget show up in the directory requires a bit more traffic — somewhere around 30 to 50 users seems to do the trick.

If you’re interested in promoting your feed you should check out the “Add to Google” button generator. The tool asks for your feed URL, then generates HTML to display a small “Add to Google” button (like this one: Add to Google) on your site. Encouraging users to add your feed to their personalized homepage may help you eventually make it into the content directory.

I don’t blame people for being confused about how all of this works. Google doesn’t make the process very clear to content publishes. The information in this post is spread over about five pages distributed throughout the Google Gadget documentation. Some information resides several links deep in Google’s documentation for Gadget Developers. The truth is, even after reading all of Google’s documentation there are still some details that are unclear or ambiguous. So if anyone spots any inaccuracies in this post, or has anything to add, please post a comment!