The beauty of start pages like iGoogle and Windows live is that they enable you to customise the content that you see on your internet start page, providing you with instant news, stock quotes and even games. There’s a huge variety of gadgets that you can add and Google even provides you with the opportunity to create your own. However, there are still parts of the web that aren’t represented with their own start page gadgets and if you want to regularly refer to them; you have to repeatedly visit their pages. Thanks to the web application Alchemy Grid, you can now generate a widget out of pretty much any web content you like and then add it to your start page, blog or even your personal web site.
You can find the service at http://grid.orch8.net/clippings/grab and there’s a helpful screen cast that demonstrates it in action. The walkthrough below shows how you can create a widget using Alchemy Grid. Once you’ve signed up for an account and logged in, you can browse to the web page that you want to extract content from. This appears within the clipping web page. When you’ve found the item that you want to use, you need to turn on the clipping tool. You can then highlight sections of the page and select them to clip. Once you’ve grabbed the content it’s displayed in its own frame and you can opt to keep or discard the original site’s CSS and JavaScript content. When you’re happy that you’ve grabbed what you want, you can begin customising your widget.
You can provide a title for the gadget and select a colour scheme for it too. You can also specify the width and height in pixels of the gadget. For most popular start pages and blogs, simply click the one you want to use and log into it to automatically add the content. If you want to include it in a web page or your provider isn’t listed, click Other and copy the HTML code to paste into your website. Once published, your widget will appear just where you pasted it.
Scrape your own content
Make a start page or blog widget from any web content you like
1
Browse to http://grid.orch8.net/clippings/grab and log in or create an account. Choose Clippings and enter the URL for the web page that you want to grab content from. This loads into the clipping interface. Continue to browse until you find the content that you want.
2
Click to select some content and then move the mouse to the item that you want to use. Click and choose Grab it! You’ll see your content clipping displayed in a pane. You can turn off the original site’s CSS if you wish. Click Save it!
3
Provide your content clipping with a name and select the colour and size of the widget that you want to use. When you’ve got it looking the way you want, select the start page or blog service that you want to use it with and follow the prompts to add it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment