Yesterday afternoon when I was working on altering a table, DB2 kind of hung up and would not let me do any work to that table. So I decided to implement a cool idea I got from the lab meeting on Wednesday, that was, to make a PubCloud gadget for iGoogle.
At first, I thought it would not be easy, because these interactive tools on the web would require you to know in detail about ajax, javascript...etc, which I am not that familiar with. Surprisingly, as I searched for Google's documentation on making gadgets, it was so simple. All you need to do is specify some parameters and descriptions in an XML file, and place your HTML and Javascript code in the specified block, and you are done.
Very quickly, I made the gadget, and made a simplified version of PubCloud to accommodate the smaller frame of the gadget. Instead of allowing the user to select one of the abstracts, authors, and mesh terms to make a cloud, and to choose the number of articles to retrieve, iPubCloud retrieves a maximum of 100 articles and make a cloud based on only the abstracts. Another important point of the simplied version is that it only shows 50 most frequent tags.
Anyhow, as of today, this is only a draft version. It will be made public to the iGoogle gadget repository once the planned improvements are implemented and tested. For now, have a try and leave comments or email me to let me know what you think. Suggestions for improvements are always welcomed.
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