Clumsy Gadget

Well, one night I was sitting and doing something on my comp when suddenly my room mate calls and says, there was an earthquake in our office! At first I blurted wha?!!! His ofc is on the taramani rd; not really that far if you go on a bike. I never noticed anything, and I didn't believe it was an earthquake at first.

Well some tweeters from chennai did post about experiencing mild tremors and the sorts. Thats when I confirmed there had been a tremor. I live on the ground floor so I couldn't feel anything. Mostly people living in high-rise buildings would have felt the vibrations. And if I am correct it was because of an earthquake in Andaman or somewhere near the coast of Japan.

That twitter search page came in handy for this particular event. The neat thing about it is the real-time info - the minute I post something, if you search for it, its there. However this was not the first time I've used twitter search. Remember the time when the news channels & papers announced there were about 7 deaths in chennai due to swine flu; I did actually think if finding out if people going to work were wearing masks!

Nevertheless, I found the thing useful to a certain degree. Then I wanted to keep track of such trends. In order to make this task easier I thought I get a iGoogle gadget designed to do so. I couldn't find the perfect one. So I built one. It is not so perfect, but it is more or less real-time. At least the posts will keep updating.

If you looking to add this gadget in your igoogle page there are a couple of things to do. First go to the page where you usually go to add stuff (click on the Add stuff link in your igoogle page). If you look closely there is a link which says Add feed or gadget. If you click just paste the url given below, and click on the Add button

http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/115976558690780681327/the-twitter-search.xml

If you are lucky this should work else you'd get a message saying not found. I don't have a solution to that as of yet. But if that happens I can suggest some workarounds.

PS: anyone is welcomed to change the look & feel of that app. If you ever decide to do so just preserve the 'by deostroll' part.