Do you read blogs on a regular basis? I am a blog addict, but, I’m also a fickle reader and impulsive in my subscribing. There are tons of programs to read your blogs in (Readers) but I’ve never found one that showed me what I have in a organized, and easily to look at format.
I follow tech blogs, cooking blogs, chick blogs, book blogs, just really well written blogs so I have a full plate. What I’ve found for me that works the best, make your own homepage, called igoogle. Here’s how you do it.
1. Go to google.com/ig and click Get your own homepage or get started.
2. Select your interests, select a theme-later you will find there are hundreds!, and then fill in your location.
3. Then you are good to go you have a very basic page with some news widgets, and probably some others depending on what you clicked as your interests.
4. Now you need to set this page as your homepage, usually this at the top of your browser under Tools, then it’s options and you’ll find set homepage or something along those lines, then (make sure you were on your new Google Homepage, and click use current. Your all set with that now the fun stuff.
Google lets you really personalize this page, you can change the theme, that’s up towards the top in the header it will say change theme from (whatever your current them is) click it and you’ll see tons of options. But that is so just the beginning. You can add gadgets too. Which I bet you’ve already seen if you went and changed the theme right away, it’s also up in the header area. There are a huge amount of gadgets. I have the People Magazine gadget, I play Scrabble with the Scrabble gadget I have a bunch of games going with friends who also have the gadget. If you have gmail there is a preview gadget for that, calendars, sports news etc…
But the real reason I love it, I use it as my RSS Reader. When you are only a blog you really like look for the RSS icon, it’s orange and is the picture in this article. Click that and you will get a page that pops up and it asks you which reader you want to add it to, click Google, you can add it to a regular Google reader or add to your homepage. Click add to your homepage, it will then take you to your homepage and you’ll see it’s been added. It will show probably 3 or 4 recent blog posts available which you can click and read on the blogs page. Love it!
I currently have about 21 blog RSS feeds on my front page and 4 gadgets. Now for the fickle part, if you decide you no longer want to follow a blog or you want to get rid of a gadget, click the little triangle in the upper right corner in the gadget or feed, you get a drop down that says delete this gadget, that’s it.
Also you can rearrange your gadgets, just hold your left mouse button down in the title bar of the gadget and drag it.
Love my Google Homepage, how about you? Have one? Going to get one? Do you do something better to read all your blogs?
