iGoogle gadget (Read 2105 times)

oooh me too.. I was thinking this yesterday

Awesome, thanks Eric!

At my boss's request I wrote a little iGoogle gadget today that displays a user's total distances from RunningAHEAD. It uses the scripts feature that you can access from your RA Tools menu. The gadget is not fancy, but it allows you to set its title and the log ID for the user you want to track. You can add multiple instances of it to your iGoogle page in case you like to log stalk as much as I do. (Trent, I'm watching you. ) Click the following link to see a screenshot and optionally add it to your iGoogle page: RunningAHEAD Distance Totals By default, it will show my log totals, which will be amusing (or sad) to most of you. Click "Edit Settings" off the drop down menu in the gadget's upper right corner to change the title and log ID. The log ID is not the person's RunningAHEAD user name. It's the long hexadecimal string from the user's summary page URL. For example, the URL to my log summary page is http://www.runningahead.com/logs/23fbfe3407d54034bb604d607cb56919. So the log ID for me is 23fbfe3407d54034bb604d607cb56919. Similarly, the log ID for Trent is 259c5652820340638512f715ed2ff6c7. Note: A user must have their log shared publically (i.e., for everyone to access it) in order for the scripts to work. So if your log (or someone you want to stalk) is private, then you won't be able to use it with this gadget. Enjoy, and please let me know of any problems you encounter. I already know that the "Powered by RunningAHEAD" link at the bottom only targets the gadget frame, but that's hard to fix since Eric's script generates that HTML. Also, let me know if you'd also be interested in gadgets to display your latest workouts and your PRs. Eric provides scripts for those, so it would be easy to create iGoogle gadgets that display their output too. Eric, RunningAHEAD rocks! I look forward to seeing what you'll add for iGoogle, but I'm hoping the log upgrades and GPS import features ship first. I'm also hoping the new log upgrades will provide some web service functionality, so I can programmatically add log entries, courses, etc. Then we could make some super cool gadgets...

Awesome... thank you Bill!

If your a Mac user running Leopard, you can make your own RA Dashboard widget. Leopard has toolwhich pretty much let you make a widget from any web page. I don't remember all the steps off the top of my head, but it's an option in Safari. Seems like all I had to do was draw a box around the summary portion of the training log page. A few clicks later, I had a widget!

So, can you have the widget allow data entry?

Yes, it could allow data entry, but I couldn't push the data into RA. To my knowledge there are no web APIs to RA other than the scripts Eric makes available through the Tools page. The scripts just read log data and return an HTML summary of it.

Cool stuff! Thanks Bill...