Stay GIF: How to find a gadget in the Add a Gadget list

Saturday, October 3, 2015

How to find a gadget in the Add a Gadget list - quickly

This article explains a quick way to find the widget that you are looking for in the list that Blogger displays when you use the Add a Gadget tool.

When you start to add a gadget to your blog, Blogger opens a new window listing all the existing page-elements that are available (in two tabs) and allowing you to upload a widget of your own (in a third tab.)

Currently, the first tab (called Basics) has 28 gadgets listed, while the second one (called More gadgets) has 899, displayed in pages of 30.

There is a search-for-gadgets feature available on the second tab - but it doesn't return gadgets that are listed on the first tab. And even when it did, I didn't recommend it, because sometimes 3rd party gadgets with similar names were listed before the official widgets developed by Blogger.

So, to find a gadget that's listed in the Basics tab, you have to scroll down the list until you see the gadget you want. However there are some problems with this.

Given that there are 28 gadgets listed, but only about 4 shown at each click (may be different if you have a larger screen), this can be a lot of clicks.
It's very easy to miss the gadget you want, and keep clicking through to the bottom instead.

But there is a very simple way to go directly to the gadget you want, provided you know what it is called, or some words that are shown in the description of that gadget and no other.

How to navigate directly to your desired gadget

Choose Add a gadget

When the new window has opened, use your browser's "find" command.

In Chrome and Firefox, this is ctrl /f , ie hold down the Control key while pressing the "f" key once.

Type in a few letters of the name (or description) of the gadget you want.

Note: these can be any letter, they don't have to be at the start. But they must appear together.

Usually, as soon as you start typing, your web-browser will start scrolling down to the first place in the screen where the letters you type appear. So if you choose the gadget details you type carefully, you should end up scrolled down to the gadget you want very quickly indeed.

The scroll bar at the side shows how far down the window you have come, and also if there are more cases of those letters further down the page.

And once you are at the gadget you want, you can just click the name or the blue plus-sign on the right side to open the gadget configuration page.