I hate featuring feeds. There are better ways to view your feeds like Google Reader. So needless to say the feeds better be darn interesting to make the cut. Luckily Hack a Day is just that interesting.

Now I know that when you here Hack you think of Computer viruses and whatnot. I can assure you that this couldn’t be farther from the point of Hack a Day. Instead it defines hacks more as things that are “rigged together”. Now I guess I have to define what I mean by “rigged together”. Basically I mean making more use out of things than they would be right out of the box. For example one of the first posts I saw was one on how someone made a portable Nintendo Wii. While I may not necessarily be making a portable Wii myself I still find it interesting that someone had the ingenuity to make it. Another cool article was basically a discussion on whether or not you can make a DTV converter box do anything other than what was intended. While I cannot understand much of what the comments are talking about, I could tell that they were exchanging some interesting ideas.

As I have said before feedburner (which Hack a Day uses) has by far the best design for Google Gadgets. It takes up the minimum amount of space possible. Also at the same time you can read a summary and little details about the post by pressing the expand button next to the link. So why not throw Hack a Day on your iGoogle page and see what hackers are up to.

Craigslist is an interesting service. I have found some fairly good deals on Craigslist. However, sometimes I just get entertainment from how much people overvalue their things. Well now I can get all the kicks I want from the Craigslist Monitor 2.0.

As usual I will quote Wikipedia to get everyone caught up:
“Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with jobs, internships, housing, personals, erotic services, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, résumé, and pets categories – and forums on various topics.”

This Gadget provides a fine way to view all of the functions of Craigslist.com within a gadget. In fact I would almost say that it is better to use the gadget than the website. The reason I say that is because of the tabs. You are allowed three tabs within Craigslist Monitor 2.0. These tabs can be easily customized to feature any search term you desire. This is done in the settings menu. This basically allows me to keep a constant eye on those sections that matter to me.

I do have a few issues that while don’t ruin the gadget, could certainly improve it. For one thing it does take up more vertical space than I want. I believe that as long as there is a scrolling bar I could make due with seeing 4 or 5 lines of text at most, at a time. The other thing is that it is awkward to return back to your last page within your gadget. As far as I could tell there is no back button within the gadget. You can press the back button on your browser to actually go back within the gadget, but that is a far from elegant solution. Regardless Craigslist Monitor 2.0 is the best Craigslist gadget I could find.

Horoscopes are interesting to say the least. I know that they are written so that anyone can apply them to their day. However, I swear that sometimes they are written just for me. I don’t know if it is a good or a bad thing that I follow horoscopes, but regardless the Personalized Horoscope Widget makes a nice addition to my iGoogle page.

There are several choices for horoscope gadgets, but I found the Personalized Horoscope Widget to be the nicest. This gadget passes on all levels for a gadget. One of the most important in my opinion is the aesthetics. I kinda like my iGoogle page to look snazzy. Luckily not only does the Personalized Horoscope Widget have a a pleasing design it also allows for added customization. There may only be 2 measly skins to choose from, but with 3 shades of color for each you can match it to the rest of your page fairly easily. Also for added customization you can input your name to be displayed at the top of the gadget. The finished product is a finely tuned gadget.

Also the Personalized Horoscope Widget nearly masters the problem of space limitation. There is in fact some ads at the bottom of the gadget are barely noticeable. I will admit that there is some white space wasted at the very bottom of the gadget, but for some reason it doesn’t bother me like some gadgets do. This is definitely a valuable gadget.

As I write this article it is a blizzard outside. There is not a single sign of life visible. Needless to say this can lead to that winter dreary that most everyone experiences. So like all mental illnesses, I resort to my iGoogle page for a cure. Once again Google gadgets pulls through and give me Flowers of the Day.

Let me just say that I love flowers. I am not the least bit shamed of admitting it. So when I came across the Flowers of the Day gadget I was fairly excited. It delivered with its name. I definitely got pictures of flowers. The gadget features a slide show of pictures of flowers. There appears to be a large supply of photos, because I have yet to see a repeat. My only complaint with the pictures is that they tend to be a little to artistic for my tastes. I just prefer simple pictures flowers.

As far as Gadget implementation goes, Flowers of the Day falls short. About half of the gadget consists of the actual sideshow itself. The rest is ads and empty space. I know to a lot of iGoogle masters this may seem like a sin, but to a casual iGoogle page user this may be an alright trade off. For me this gadget gave me just enough of that good weather feeling to get me through the snowstorm.

If you don’t know about RSS feeds, check out this video first. And while there are many different feed readers, I’ve found Google Reader to be the best. Explaining Google Reader is beyond the scope of this post, but check out Google’s own introduction of it here.

I’ve needed an easier way to access Google Reader, and now I can, from within iGoogle as a gadget. And since its made by Google, it has abilities that most gadgets do not. One is that it can display things beyond the borders of its iframe. You’ll notice this in the popup bubbles when displaying a post.

You can display up to 10 posts at a time and sort by oldest or newest. You can view by Tag or Folder. And it also has two different views in the Canvas Page: Expanded and List. Remarkably, the Reader keyboard shortcuts that I love work in the Canvas view.

Everyone should be taking advantage of RSS feeds these days. Try this gadget.

No I am not talking about the most recent fashions trends. Instead I am referring to the much more interesting Google trends. What better way to keep up with what people are Googling than with the Google Hot Trends gadget on your iGoogle page.

I find news feeds a little untrustworthy sometimes. I don’t want some editor deciding what news I should be paying attention to. So instead I largely look at the Google Hot Trends gadget to see what is going on in the world. This has proven consistently to be a valuable source of information. From what I can tell people seem to search for info on things faster than the news can cover it. So if any real news happens the trends will tell me to search for it.

The Google Hot Trends gadget uses perhaps the most easily understandable rating system available: Hotness. Depending on how much the popularity of a search has increase it is put on a rating scale of “mild” to Volcanic. However this is completely dependent on the spike in traffic. The number one search can be mild at one point and volcanic at another.

To be honest, not all the top searches are completely legit. Sometimes on a slow news day weird things will happen. Every once in a while meaningless things will appear as a top search like “Meg Griffin” or the occasional dirty video reference. Perhaps on the funniest of occasions a large group of people will work together to game the system and get a funny message to appear as a “hot” search. However. it is all good fun and just adds to the usefullness of the gadget.

If you’re reading this post, chances are you’ve probably visited a real Official Google blog at least once… Yes? Google loves to post announcements about everything from their APIs to Youtube censorship fiascoes, and they’ve created this gadget to help you keep track of it all. It lets you choose a content-category from a drop down and see the latest three Google blog posts relating to that category. For example, if I choose “Google-wide” I see two postings from the official Google blog and one from the Google Mac blog.

So why is this useful? In short, in saves you from cluttering up a whole tab with Google blog feeds (if you prefer the tab, Google’s created that too). The only problem here is that for some bizarre reason the developer has included all the international blogs in the content mix, which leads to duplicated posts across countries and content showing up in Japanese, German and a bunch of other languages I don’t happen to speak. How many English speakers can read Japanese? Why isn’t they’re an option to see only English-language posts (or only Japanese posts if you’re from Japan)? Why Google, why? Apparently there are plans to use the language API to translate these foreign posts into English, but regardless, I’d still like to have the option to filter them out. In any case, if you’re a Google fan like me and you like having a little digest from their many blogs, then this gadget should come in handy.

I looked high and low for a great Thanksgiving gadget to celebrate the holiday today, and what did I find? A photo gadget with pictures of winter, a “thanksgiving songs” gadget that was a big ad for Amazon, and a collection of flash games involving turkeys that were shrunk down beyond recognition. For shame! What about a recipe contest, or a photo gadget where you can post pictures of your hard work, or top ten myths about thanksgiving day origins, or something a little bit innovative!

Anyway, after messing around with turkey bowling and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade gadget (horrendously slow and clunky), I decided to go with a simple Recipe feed from Elise.com to get back to what the holiday is really about, eating enormous amounts of food. The feed includes a new recipe every couples of days, with a picture and a long description, and tries for quality over quantity. Elise boasts that every recipe is tested by her or her family personally, and she has even posted this heartwarming picture of her parents to prove it! Recipes for today include Turkey Soup, Stuffing, apple pie and quite a few more.  Cons, the feed could use some sharing functionality and/or inline ratings to make it a bit more interactive, but otherwise very solid.