Back in 2007 or so I was trying to find a place where I could see all the daily comics. Google Homepages had been around so I tried adding comic RSS feeds to my homepage. Those feeds were pretty bad. They gave me links to the daily comic instead of showing me the comic. I thus decided to take things into my own hands. Using Google Gadgets API I developed my first Comics Gadget.

It was ok but it required scrolling to read the comic which was usability-wise sucked. So I worked a bit harder and released Comics Gadget Version 2.

Version 2 put the comics in the footer of the Google Homepage. It was full page so you did not have to scroll. Also it had buttons where you could go back to previous strips.

Since then I have upgraded to version 3 with more comics as well as a much cleaner design.

The source code of the gadget is available on github.

UPDATE:

On behalf of Comics.com, Google has taken down and blacklisted my comic. I can no longer publish and use the comic. But anyone with sufficient HTML knowledge can host their own gadget and use it themselves…at least for iGoogle is still around. I’m also working on an iOS version which you can also find on github.