iGoogle

Now just before i begin with the topic of this post, i just want to say 'yes' i have slowed down on posting new post here, only because i have ran out of pictures to upload, and not to mention that i have exams this week for my Tafe course. Even though Tafe is easy for me and i spend more time playing than studying i do still have to sleep early and take better care of my health, however i still do have time to update my blog as i have been doing for the past week. For example i have changed the pictures to now show before-and-afters with an orange arrow to indicate the change. I've posted some comments and added some feeds from my favorite blogs.

One day while browsing with my favorite home search engine - google, i decided to just click around and see what those little links at the top right of the page was for, they have been there all those times but i just thought they were for help or advertisements. Then i discover the igoogle homepage customisation page, Here you can costomise your google homepage to have themes, tabs, windows that can show anything from the time to your personal horoscope. You can even add specific feeds from your favorite blogs like i did. By the way you need to sign in with a google account to do so. Otherwise just by clicking on the igoogle link you won't be able to add any new google-windows, or change the themes.

Click on the following thumbnails pictures to enlarge

I think the Themes are the best part, google has created some great themes with nice colour and animational background. That's not all, the themes changes by itself according the time of day and locational weather. How cool is that! So if your at home on a dark raining night then your themes will include night and rain in them. the only downfall is that there is only 6 themes to choose from, and aparently i notice one of the themes i.e. city scape doesn't change according to weather and time of day, i'm not sure why.

For those people who do not know what an RSS is - which is most people i think. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, so what does that mean you might ask, well here's the definition from Wikipedia :

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed," "web feed," or "channel," contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually.

RSS content can be read using software called a "feed reader" or an "aggregator." The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

Basically igoogle is a considered a feed reader, or some might like to call it newsreader. So if you want you can add feeds from any site that has the RSS link.
The Mozilla Firefox browser can identify sites/blogs that has RSS enabled, if so you will be able to see an orange icon like this:

(Also taken from Wikipedia)

This icon will be rather small and can be view at the status bottom left hand side of the browser in the status bar. If you see this then it means that there exist a RSS link somewhere. So when you find the link for subscribe somewhere, just right click on it and select Copy Link Location (or Copy Shortcut in Internet Explorer) then go back to the igoogle site to the add in your RSS link.

for example at the end of my home blog page there is the RSS link called Posts (Atom). The image below show an example of how to copy the RSS link.

Well, that was abit of a lecture, hope this helps and if your still confused and want to know more, then go and borrow the "Blogging for Dummies" book from a library near you.