I’m pleased to be able to announce a new iGoogle gadget for BBC News, meaning you can enjoy BBC News everywhere your iGoogle page goes (even in Beijing for the Olympics!). This is configurable for the UK or International main front page, and doubtless I’ll add more bits later. This is hosted on Google architecture, runs using JavaScript, and (unlike the normal iGoogle RSS feeds) includes a pretty image as well, which is a good glanceable way of knowing when the news has changed. I’ve had something similar on my iGoogle page for a while, but since it was written before the BBC News RSS feed contained images, it was screenscraping (which is against the BBC’s terms and conditions).

Earlier this year, I blogged about my BBC Weather widget, which, as the BBC News widget, I built as a bit of relaxation coding exercise. (Unusually, I’ve been at home today off sick - I think the current curious stress at work got to me over the weekend; I didn’t sleep too well and had strange headaches; so relaxation coding this afternoon was quite pleasant).

Sadly, Google doesn’t allow you to move where a gadget is, so today, I had to deliberately break my BBC Weather one; I’ve moved it (and totally re-authored it to use JavaScript). It now lives somewhere else where it can live quite happily without eating into my server bandwidth. Users of it, all 5,000 of you, have been given a new button to click right in the middle of the old BBC Weather widget, which’ll add the new one to your iGoogle page.

These two unofficial iGoogle gadgets joins the rather nice BBC Radio iGoogle gadget; that’s the only official iGoogle gadget that I’m aware of from the BBC, who - just like a company used to controlling rather than cooperating - have a strange policy aversion to doing anything on any other website apart from their own. (How you’re supposed to encourage people to discover new BBC services when you have so many byzantine rules and contracts to sign just to link to you, heaven alone knows; but this is a personal blog, and I don’t work in that area; having enough trouble with old-fashioned control in my own area right now, frankly.)

Anyway. If you, like me, use iGoogle as your front page, you can now add a ton of nice BBC-ness to it. Off you go, then. You’ll find them at http://bit.ly/bbcradio_ig, http://bit.ly/bbcnews_ig, and http://bit.ly/bbcweather_ig.

Disclosure: I’m employed by the BBC, earn money from Google, and run a media website which links to the BBC among others. My full disclosure probably needs updating, since I bet it still mentions I own shares in Emap. Better go and do that now then. Photo: Jonathan Crellin. Used under licence.

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