I’ve been building Google gadgets for a while now, and there is one thing I’ve struggled with: getting a gadget’s colors to match the colors of its container’s theme. That seemed like a mouthful, so let me break it down.

Suppose my iGoogle theme has lots of natural colors: green and brown. A gadget on that page would look better if it contained green and brown elements. But if my iGoogle theme had pink and purple colors, a gadget with green and brown elements might not look the best. A gadget’s color scheme should match the color scheme of the iGoogle container theme.

Already the iGoogle provides a few substitution variables like the __BIDI_* variables. The gadget container should pass color substitution variables along to the gadget as well. For example, __COLOR_LINK__ could be the substitution variable for link colors, allowing the iGoogle theme to set a common link color to all of the gadgets on the page. There could be a handful of different __COLOR_* variables that would be passed along for button colors, highlight colors, text colors, etc.

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Google has a nice set of modules, available for both iGoogle and the Google Desktop (which is part of Google Pack).  These modules are called gadgets, and many of which can also be syndicated onto third-party websites.

For my homepage project, I thought about using a combination of custom gadgets as well as other third-party gadgets.  However, in order to syndicate a gadget through Google, you have to provide gadget attribution back to Google.  For a page with many Gadgets, this begins to look unprofessional.

That is why I started a project called whatsits.  Whatsits are the same as gadgets, except I changed the name to differentiate between how they are served up.  The whatsits project is hosted at Google Code Project Hosting.

The whatsits project provides a number of scripts that are used to take an xml gadget description file, and provide all the methods in order to serve up the gadget on third-party web sites, but without having to show any attribution back to Google.

The project is only one day old, but I’ve already been able to use it to serve a custom gadget up in an iframe.  Currently, the biggest task of the project will be re-writing Google’s gadget javascript library, which I plan to do slowly as I need particular functions.

Anyone who would like to assist in the project can leave a comment and I’ll get a hold of you.

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