I've been having a lot of fun building Smart Blocks recently. Today I'm posting two more. They're both from a vast library of fun stuff that you can put on your web page called Google Gadgets. They're a lot like widgets, but for you web page. And best of all they're really easy to make into Smart Blocks. It's mostly just a copy and paste task.

If you want to build your own Smart Block from a Google Gadget, you can use the code from these. You can see how I used the <blocks type=property id=width /> markup tag to let the embedded gadget know how big the block is. That way you can resize the block and the Gadget will resize or center itself appropriately.

Something Useful
The first Smart Block is just a little calendar. It's a monthly view of the Google Calendar app. If you use thee online Google Calendar then you can even link this view to your own Calendar. I haven't done that though. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. ;-)

Something Fun
And in the not-so-useful category is a nice little koi pond. Some little fish swim around in the pond all day and will follow your mouse if you get near. If you click they get fed and I think they like that. I didn't write this one, I just brought it to RapidWeaver. You should really go thank Adam Bowman for bringing such cool things to our sites.

To Download
1. Click here for the calendar.
2. Click here for the fish.

To Install
1. Download.
2. Decompress the file (Safari does that automatically).
3. Open a Blocks page.
4. Drag the icon from the Finder to a Blocks layout.

To Use
1. Install
2. Open a Blocks page.
3. Open the Blocks Library Window
4. Drag from the Library to you Blocks layout.
5. Enjoy.

Tags: smartblock, Google, Gadget, fish, Calendar

Everyone liked the Flickr SmartBlock so much that I decided I'd do one more. This is the same thing, but this time without Flash — so now it'll work on your iPhone too.

Just click on the image to the right to download.

The bonus of doing it without Flash is that the interface is a bit more flexible. You can change the shape of the block and the number of images that it displays. Of course those are great things to do with Smart Tags, so don't worry about editing the HTML -- just open up the smart info window and drag the slider.

If you're new to this thread, then you might want to jump over to the previous post and read how to find your Flickr ID and install this SmartBlock. Yahoo doesn't exactly make it easy, but once you know where to look it's not too hard either.

Tags: smartblock, flickr

I whipped up a little smart block today. It's just one of the badges from the Flickr site. I took the code they provided, simplified it a bit and inserted a SmartTag to control the user ID and voila, it's a cool little reusable library element.

To use it:
1) Click on the picture to the right to download it.
2) Safari usually decompresses these sorts of things, but if your browser doesn't, then double click the zip file to decompress it. It should then be called, "flickrbadge.block"
3) Drag the file from the Finder to the middle of a Blocks layout.
4) Open your Blocks library.
5) Drag the library element to a blocks layout.
6) Open the Smart Info window and customize the Flicker ID

To find your Flickr ID, open up your Flickr photo stream and click on the RSS feed (it's the blue rectangle in the address bar of Safari).
Your Flickr ID is in there. Here's what Nik Fletchers RSS feed url looks like:
feed://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=80573242@N00&lang=en-us&format=atom
The ID is the part in there that's after "id=" and before the next "&". That's what you'll want to put into the Smart Info window.
Just so were clear, here's one more example (this is my stream):
feed://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=41787274@N00&;lang=en-us&format=atom

Tags: smartblock, flickr, flash