iGoogle is http://www.google.com/ig
but the Lboro special one is http://partnerpage.google.com/lboro.ac.uk
If you want to write Gadgets you should add to iGoogle the following 2 gadgets: Google Gadget Editor (GGE) and the Gadget Checker
To use a DIY gadget on your own iGoogle, select publish on the GGE and IGNORE THE DIRE VALIDATION WARNINGS OF THINGS THAT NEED TO BE FIXED, then choose "Add to my iGoogle page"
If you want to have a Google Doc on view at iGoogle, use the gadget "Fetch the content of a Google document". Under "edit settings", make sure the URL you put is the "uploaded" URL of the document, not the editing URL - see Share|"Publish to the web..." from the document editor.
I have had trouble with Safari reporting Script TimeOut which may be related to multiple sign-in which I had turned on temporarily [Slow Script - Safari is no longer responding because of a script on the webpage “iGoogle” (http://partnerpage.google.com/lboro.ac.uk). Do you want to stop running the script, or let it continue?]
I get the same trouble with Firefox reporting "A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete. Script: https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/1254644934-kix_main_i18n_kix_core.js:115"
"User Preferences" and writing all the HTML content dynamically is dealt with at http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/basic.html.
"Saving state" is dealt with at http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/fundamentals.html.
Note especially the bit about saving into a json string.
When working with UserPrefs I thought that gadjets.json.parse(string) was not working - but I read somewhere that you have to put gadgets.json.parse(gadgets.util.unescapeString(string))
