[For clearer viewing of this video, I recommend clicking on the monitor icon in the lower right-hand corner of the video player to view this clip full-screen.]
In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve begun to explore screencasts as a far more visual way of depicting subject matter than text or screen shots are capable of. I find they are a very effective means of explaining a process/workflow in that they enable a proper demonstration. I’m also hopeful that, once I get the workflow finalised, they can also be a much faster way to answer user questions or address areas of uncertainty – and importantly, in a manner that can be reused, shared, or built upon.
Particularly in the case of the latter, anything I make available here is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. So if you find it useful, please feel free to rip it, adapt it, and redistribute it.
With that said, this is my latest offering. I have been using Netvibes as my browser home page for a few weeks now – due largely to the fact they offer the option to embed 3rd party web pages. I have just discovered that Google’s customiseable home page, iGoogle, supports the same functionality, and have begun to explore the possibilities.
Whereas most browsers come with a generic start-up page, such as Google, MSN or Yahoo! searches – personally, I think leaving them at that is not an effective use of time and space. Customiseable homepages like Netvibes, iGoogle, and Pageflakes by contrast are a great way of putting your start-up page to good use. Via a large and growing library of widgets, you are effectively able to create a personal portal to all the different sites, resources, and information that you regularly use.
Very nice. Exactly what I was looking for.
Thank you
I have listened to this several times….I can get the site embedded into igoogle, but it won’t let me log in from there. Will this not work with sites that require log ins?
Thanks!
@Karen: Which site are you having trouble with (e.g. what you’re including in the iFrame, not iGoogle)? Also, when you say you can’t login, do you mean you’re able to see the fields where you enter your username and password, but the site isn’t recognising them – or that you not able to see the login fields at all?
I’ve been able to use this method with sites that require logins – so in theory it should be fine – but it all depends on what site you’re trying to embed, and how it’s configured. Some sites (like Gmail and Wikipedia for example) will not let you embed them in an iFrame and will refresh the page the second you try and load it and remove the iGoogle instance (e.g. load the site natively in the browser). But that is a different matter to what you’re describing I think.
If you can provide some additional information on what’s happening (or ideally even a screenshot) I’m happy to help you work through it.