Meetup Gadget

After finished the Meetups Coming To Town, I was asked to see if I can convert it into a Google Gadget which is much easier for users to integrate into their browser. I didn't have time until last weekend, with two days testing and tuning, the new "Meetups Coming To Town" gadget finally born.

I have to removed the auto location detect function from the web-based version since I still could not find a reliable and free geo location API and the Google Gears is still not a standard for most of the users. Therefore, users need to manually type into their state and city to get correct display. A "topic" field allow users to filter the meetups by keyword.

The background engine to talk to the Meetup API is a PHP script under Apache, I will change it to a Google App Engine application in the near future. The Google Gadgets API is very easy to use, most of the codes in the program no need to change, the Ajax part is the place I spent a lot of time to redo and tune the codes.

Give it a try and give me the comment, no matter you like it or hate it! However, the Meetup API search function is not that friendly, for example, if you search "single" you might get nothing, if change to "singles" you will get plenty of meetups.