Today we've added four new
Google Web
Elements:
Sidewiki,
Checkout,
Wave and
Virtual Keyboard. These are all designed to help you quickly and easily
integrate Google products into your website.
Sidewiki
element
Google Sidewiki makes it
easy for visitors of your website to share helpful information with each other. Unlike regular
comments, all Sidewiki entries are
ranked by usefulness so that the best ones are shown
first. The element was built entirely on the
Sidewiki API and can
be customized in many ways to fit into your site. Sidewiki originally launched as a feature of
Google Toolbar and
as a
Chrome extension - this element is our newest step in making
Sidewiki more open and accessible across the web. If you'll be using the element on your site,
let us know via
@googlesidewiki on Twitter!
If
you're looking for a way to add commenting to an otherwise static page, the
Google
Sidewiki element gives you an easy and simple way to collect and display comments
about a page. One of the new and exciting features of the Sidewiki element is that it allows
visitors to leave a comment even if they do not have Sidewiki or Google Toolbar installed.
Like all Sidewiki entries, the comments in the element will be ranked to show the most useful
items more prominently.
Checkout
element
The
Google Checkout element allows you to quickly and easily create an
online store using a spreadsheet. Once you have a
Google Checkout merchant account, you just have
to add details for each item you're selling into a
Google Spreadsheet, then use the wizard and
copy/paste the code into your website. The element is compatible with Blogger, Google Sites,
iGoogle, and personal websites where HTML can be modified, but doesn't require any programming
skills or experience. In fact, you can get your first online store up and running in under
five minutes.
Wave
element
The
Google
Wave element enables you to quickly drop a wave -- a shared workspace -- onto your
own website. The wave could be used for many different things, including: encouraging
collaborative discussion among the visitors, or as a means of publishing content on the page.
For deeper integrations of waves onto your own site, please check out the recently improved
Wave Embed API. For more information on embedding waves, see the
Google Wave Developer Blog
post.
Adding a
virtual keyboard to your site just got easier with the
Google Virtual Keyboard element. After choosing a keyboard
layout, copy and paste the HTML into your page and voila, a virtual keyboard will be able to
enter characters into any text input or text area on your page. If you've never heard a
virtual keyboard, it's an on screen keyboard which translates the input from one keyboard
layout to another and it allows users to type their own languages on foreign keyboards or by
clicking the on screen display.
Google Web Elements are great for folks who don't have much time or experience. However,
even for advanced developers, elements are a great starting point, as most are backed by an
underlying API to give you even more control over the content or look and feel. Take a look at
all of the elements at
http://www.google.com/webelements and
stop by our
help forum if you have any
questions.
The Google Checkout element allows you to quickly and easily create an
online store using a spreadsheet. Once you have a Google Checkout merchant account, you just have
to add details for each item you're selling into a Google Spreadsheet, then use the wizard and
copy/paste the code into your website. The element is compatible with Blogger, Google Sites,
iGoogle, and personal websites where HTML can be modified, but doesn't require any programming
skills or experience. In fact, you can get your first online store up and running in under
five minutes.
