igoogle. yes i do
iGoogle is the personalised Google home page. It consists of the standard Google search page with your own elements added. Here you can display feeds of the latest contents from different websites of your choice, such as news stories or blog posts. You can also create tabbed pages, and access online tools such as Google Docs and Notebook.
The setup process is very simple. Get yourself a GMail account and you can use any Google service with the login. You don’t have to actually change email (although GMail is very good) because you just need the login. I don’t use GMail as I have a webmail thingy from my website hosting people (1and1: cheap and plenty of features).
Once you have a Google login, you can create your iGoogle homepage by dragging and dropping elements into your page. These are boxes of content, that you can rearrange at any time. Google provides all the usual news and entertainment-type stuff to choose from, as well as things like ‘thought for the day’ or ‘how to of the day’ or assorted flavours of ‘picture of the day’. These will obviously refresh every day so your homepage always has new and interesting things to look at.
The temptation at this stage is to load your page with exciting stuff. This will slow your page’s loading time down if you have loads of elements that need to contact other websites and refresh. I very quickly ditched the weather and Buddhist thought for the day…
The most-used element on my page is the Google Reader, an RSS feed reader. This lists new posts from all your favourite blogs or updates from sites that have RSS. Clicking on an entry title makes the content pop up in a comic-style speech bubble, which is a great touch that I love.
Also on my page is a ‘how to of the day’ which doesn’t get all that much use but is a bit of a laugh. I also have a headline news feed, but to be honest that’s more because I feel like I should.
One of my initial gripes was that the Google search box we all know and love takes up a third of the screen, limiting the amount of personalised content you can have without having to scroll down. For example, if you’re signed up to a lot of blogs by prolific writers, you want your RSS reader set to display lots of post titles. But this means scrolling down. Fortunately Google Homepage Maximiser is an element that you can add to your page that allows you to hide the Google search box. FireFox has a search box in the top corner anyway so you won’t miss it.
The most useful element on my page is a LifeHacker feed. LifeHacker is a site dispensing hints and advice to get the most out of your computing. I frickin’ love this site. My FireFox is groaning under the weight of the many, many extensions I’ve learnt about from this site. They’re dead into Getting Things Done as well.
One such extension is iGoogle Sidebar. This tips iGoogle into the sheer bloody genius category. Installing it adds a button on your toolbar that opens your iGoogle page in a sidebar with one click. This means you can see your headlines and so on at a glance. It’s not that practical for actually reading things though - you have to resize the sidebar or the speech bubbles are too truncated to read.
The sidebar extension becomes an essential if you also use your homepage to tie together your Google online tools. I use Google Docs and Google Notebook all the time, and it’s great to have access to them in a handy sidebar.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets (previously known as Writely) is an online word processor. It’s basic but functional. It has a spellcheck which is all I need with ninety-nine per cent of the writing I do. I blog by bashing out my text in Docs, spellchecking it, and pasting it into ScribeFire (formerly Performancing). This is fast and easy but can lead to problems with superfluous HTML going all over the place, so I have to remember to paste the clear text into ScribeFire’s HTML editor.
Google Docs handily saves every ten seconds, and allows you to access all your saved versions and revisions. You can publish and collaborate on your documents too.
Google Notebook is a listmaking programme. My setup is based on the Getting Things Done model (another LifeHack). It’s great to have my Next Actions right there to add to or edit. It’s also useful to have my Projects folder handy. Just today I customised my MySpace profile to match the look of my blog by copying and pasting the colour values from my Project list in the sidebar, where I’d earlier noted them.
Is iGoogle better than other similar homepage systems? No idea. I haven’t tried any; iGoogle works so well.