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Posted on Thursday, 22 May 2008 at 14:29

Introducing... the UK Train Times gadget for iGoogle!

Just over a week ago, Transport for London launched a series of excellent iGoogle gadgets for your homepage. I installed the Live Tube service updated widget, and now when I leave work to head home - whether at 7am or 10pm - I can see if I'm going to be stuck in a tunnel underneath London without having to leave my iGoogle page, which I keep up while at work.

I thought this was an excellent idea, and looked around at the Train Operating Company websites to see if any of them had something similar - nothing that I could find.

Then I thought about National Rail Enquiries - surely they would have something in this new, multimedia, whizzy-bang world of sharing content on the Internet? Nope. Not a Google gadget, Yahoo! widget or even a plain old RSS feed in sight - not even for the normally excellent (and award-winning) Live Departure Boards application.

So, what does an Internet geek with a few days off do? Create his own, of course!

It's currently only on my website and iGoogle (I'll see what the feedback and performance is like before branching out to other platforms), and you can find out more about it here.

Please let me know your thoughts on this application by leaving comments or emailing me.

5 Comments:

At 22 May 2008 17:05 , Anonymous said...: Ummm...National Rail Enquiries have had both a Vista Gadget for Live Departure Boards and an iGoogle gadget for Journey Planning for quite a while...
At 22 May 2008 17:07 , Matthew said...: Edward Torbett wrote one, though it's quite tricky to find if you don't know about it:
http://www.google.co.uk/ig/directory?url=ed.torbett.googlepages.com/ldb.xml

And there's a Mac widget: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/uk.railway/browse_thread/thread/0487ebd548523638

The more the merrier :)
At 23 May 2008 08:37 , Anonymous said...: Yes - National Rail Enquiries have had their own Vista Gadget for quite sometime -I think its even on its 2nd release now.

I'd be careful about scraping their data though - especially as they will no doubt do an iGoogle Gadget for departures soon, if they already doing it for Vista.
At 02 June 2008 08:13 , Corrigap said...: Very useful widget, any chance of having a few user-defined presets for individual stations?

It's a bit of a pain scrolling around if you use more than one station. Also, it would be great to have it go directly to a certain station directly on page load.

Cheers!
At 12 August 2008 07:56 , Anonymous said...: Hi,
I really like this gadget - its simpl, fast and does what it says on the tin. The other live data widget mentioned above did not update at all for me. Would be nice if there were some drop down presets for commonly used stations though! Nice job.

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The views expressed throughout this blog are my personal views, and not those of either the BBC, BBC News, Trafficlink or any other organisations I work for, or quote or reference in blog posts. This blog is not run for profit, and no payment or payment in kind is accepted for blog posts.

About the Blog

I work across the radio industry as a freelancer.

My main work now comes from the BBC's News Traffic Unit. It's not what's happening on the M1 southbound, but the first port of call for correspondents around the UK and world ready to file a story ('despatch') to anyone from the World Service to News 24, the Asian Network to BBC1 television bulletins, Radio 1 Newsbeat to The Today Programme.

I also work at BBC Three Counties Radio, Radio Five Live and Trafficlink, the company who supply traffic and travel news to BBC and commercial radio stations.

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