Tutorial on Personalized Homepage & RSS Feeds Jennifer Schelly [email protected] Most of us are used to the neat, clean, and simple Google.com homepage. It’s easy to use and very well recognized. But, it’s missing personalization, news feeds, and clocks and more that the techno-geeks among us crave. That’s why Google came up with iGoogle, a customizable page where you can add personalized gadgets and all sorts of fun items. To create your own iGoogle page, go to google.com and select the iGoogle link in the upper right hand corner. Once your account is set up, you are now ready to customize your page. In the right banner area, select the “Add Stuff” link. From here you can add “gadgets”, Google’s name for the customizable items. You can add weather, stock prices, Wikipedia, searches, quotes of the day, etc. You name it they have it. You can even change the layout of your page by selecting the arrow down next to “Home” in the left banner area and clocking “Edit This Tab”. There are different numbers of columns, different widths, etc. You can also add tabs, so you could have one news tab, one comics tab, one weather tab, etc. Once you return to your iGoogle home page, you can move the gadgets around by mousing over the top area of each gadget. When you get the four way arrow, click and drag the gadget to move it around. You can also edit the settings on each gadget by selecting the drop down arrow in each gadget and clicking “Edit Settings”. When you finish with adding and moving gadgets on your homepage, you can also select themes for the upper banner area of your page by selecting “Select theme” from the banner area (next to “Get Stuff”). Fish, puppies, world maps, changing themes based on the time of day, and more are available. I personally enjoy the world daylight map that shows which portions of the earth are sunlit and dark at any given time. And finally you can use the personalized iGoogle home page to add RSS feeds. An RSS feed is a feed of web info that can be displayed in a number of ways. One of them is using your iGoogle home page. Any time you are on a website and see one of these:

(or in the right hand area of your address bar), you can get an RSS feed of that site. To do so, click the graphic and you should get a display like the one below. When you select “Add to Google homepage” it will be added to your iGoogle homepage and you can move and edit it just like other gadgets. I like to use this to keep up with friends or companies websites where blogs or article postings are generally updated semi-regularly. My iGoogle homepage is shown below. As you can see, my preference is for three columns with weather, sunrise/set and news on the left, news and once day items in the center, and personal RSS feeds and my National Geographic Picture of the Day on the right. This is one example, but there certainly are millions, if not billions of combinations of themes, layouts and gadgets. What will yours be?

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