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The most excellent site GoogleSystem has a write up on how to enable you to chat with your site’s visitors using Google Talk.

Google Talk’s gadget was a nice addition, but you couldn’t use it to chat with unknown people or with the visitors of the site, like in Meebo Me. Now you can do that using the new chatback badges. You only need to add some code to your site and anyone could click on the generated badge to chat with you.

“A Google Talk chatback badge allows others to chat with you even if they haven’t signed up for Google Talk or a Google Account. You can put the badge in your blog or website, and people who visit those pages can chat with you. The badge will display your online status (whether you’re available to chat or not) and, optionally, your status message.”

If someone clicks on the badge, a special version of the Google Talk gadget will open and he will be able to chat with you.

The conversations are private and only one-to-one, so other visitors won’t be able to read them. For some strange reason, they’re not even added in Gmail’s chat section. Unfortunately, being constantly interrupted by other people is not very pleasant, so you can disable the link from your badge by setting your status to “busy” or by signing out of Google Talk.

I’ve put this in place on my site to test it out. It was extremely simple to enable, just scroll down to the bottom of the page and look in the About Me section and you’ll see my Google Talk badge!

Google introduced a set of themes for your personalized homepage (or iGoogle) a few months back. But if you’re looking for a few more customization options, check out this new Google gadget. Once you install the gadget on your homepage, you can choose from a variety of custom skins, create your own, or submit themes for other users to install. It currently provides 10 new skins.

 The gadget features three main tabs; a skins directory which mimics the built-in iGoogle theme selector, a tab with details of how to create and upload skins and a skins submission form. Unlike many other gadgets, this one does rely on a server side component to retrieve a list of available skins from the database in JSON format and also to validate and insert new skins submissions. This little gadget will also permit a different skin per tab - and thankfully no more reloading the page when switching skins. Works in IE and FF.

   Custom iGoogle Skins

Check out BonstioNet for the latest.

Today the Google Personal Homepage has been officially renamed iGoogle.

Originally Google decided they wanted the personalized homepage to be a feature, not a product. Hence, it doesn’t have a particular name until today. Launch your homepage and you’ll see a shiny new logo like in the image above. Notice your iGoogle may look different, the one above has the personalization theme applied to it. According to the Google folks, themes have been adopted by 30% of the Google personalized homepage user base (I use it, doesn’t slow it down to much and adds a bit of splash to the otherwise bland Google pages).

Also being launched today is Gadget Maker. Basically self made Gadgets that require no programming. There are 7 different types of gadgets that users can create with this tool. A new link at the bottom of your iGoogle page will allow you to access the Gadget Maker service. Once the gadget is created, you can invite other people to view & use the gadget, and make it publicly available for other people to view & use it.

The wizards let you enter the settings for seven new gadget templates:

1. A Photo gadget (share a series of photos with others)
2. GoogleGram gadget (allowing you to display a new greeting message to someone for every day for 7 days)
3. Daily Me gadget (which will show what you’re currently doing, as well as quotes, what’s on your mind etc.)
4. Personalized Countdown gadget
5. A Personalized List (you can e.g. publish your own top ten list with this, Google says)
6. YouTube video favorites gadget (pictured above, this gadget will let you create a YouTube channel to share)
7. A “Free Form” gadget (an “all-purpose gadget that lets you meld text and image in any way,” Google says)

The Gadgets can also be shared. You send a friend an invite, similar to a Docs/Spreadsheets invite and the gadget will be immediately shown on the invite page allowing your friend to play with it before adding it to their own page.

Neat stuff! You can read more over at Google Blogoscoped.

I’m a customizer. I love Windowsblinds, I’ve used all kinds of sidebar applications like SysMetrix, Desktop Sidebar, etc. When I first heard about Vista including a side bar I was pretty excited… then I loaded some system monitoring gadgets and it all went downhill. Perhaps it’s the fault of the gadget creators themselves and not Vista Sidebar, but that thing ate up some serious resources. My laptop is getting older (Dell XPS Gen2, 2.0Ghz, 2g RAM) so for the longest time I didn’t bother running the sidebar. After some discussions with a co-worker I decided to play with it again and loaded it up with some gadgets. Suddenly, it wouldn’t load or it would load but there would be no gadgets and Task Manager would report it continually gobbling up memory. I have no idea if it was a specific gadget that caused the problem I just knew I wanted it fixed.

The Sidebar Properties window has an option to restore the default Vista gadgets, but it was greyed out. No love there.

Unable to use the default method for restoring the defaults I set out to try and fix it manually. Here’s the steps I took:

1. Open task manager and kill any sidebar.exe process that might be running.
2. Open Explorer and browse to C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar (where <user name> is the user you log into Vista with).
3. Open Settings.ini, hit CTRL-A (select all) and hit delete. The file is now empty. Save the file.
4. Browse into the Gadgets directory.
5. Select CTRL-A (select all) and delete them. (Note: I couldn’t delete ALL of the gadgets the first try. If that happens reboot and try to delete them again… after the reboot you should be able to delete them all).
6. Restart Windows Sidebar.

Everything should load successfully now. You should see the default Sidebar with the clock, wallpaper thingy, and RSS feed. For some odd reason the “restore defaults” button is still greyed out… go figure.

Now that it’s back will I give Sidebar another shot? Probably. I love to tweak my system and I can think of a few gadgets I’d love to have always on access to… I’ll probably still shy away from the resource meters as I suspect they were causing the excess cpu cycles.