I have been looking at the newly opened Google Gadgets. I used some of them a while back when I tryed out the Google homepage, but I prefer my own basic page I have been using for 6 years now.
Some of these gadgets look like they would be good for church sites. There are Google Maps, clocks, weather displays, and other useful tools. The problem is that they are in ugly frames provided by Google.
I did some digging into them and since they are basically simple files served through Google they are easy to hack and reuse in your own style. You can see how they are put together by looking at the Google Gadgets API. I used the provided code and then right-clicked inside the produced iframe to see the code of that frame. Then you can extract the code there or even travel to the source of it to use the original tools.
For any of the Google map tools you will need an API key, and some of them may take a bit of web knowhow to get working. Browsing the gadgets has even led me to an interesting service called spacebrowse.
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