RSS Feeds and iGoogle

One of the goals I set was to set up RSS feeds to my blog. My intention: I wished to customize my blog page with a selection of RSS feeds on topics of interest. I imagined that the blog site offered aggregator services.

The reality: After some poking around, I realized that the way RSS feeds work at eBlogger was not what I had in mind. From my blog, the most I could do is set up a RSS feed to essentially "broadcast" my blog to the world wide web. Folks at large on the web would be able to read my site because they set up aggregator/reader pick up my site based on the topic. Not what I intended.

The solution: After reading David's blog about iGoogle, I decided to customize my own page. The starkness of the classic Google home page always irked me. In the early days of web browsing, I had used Yahoo! and liked the format of its search page. For the last six years, my web browser had been set to the Google basic page as a default. Over the last six years, I simply did not have time to explore the web let alone the fancifying options Google offered. I was tipped off to the possibility of customization when I had seen Allison's cool page. I asked her "How did you do it?" "iGoogle" she said. It suddenly made sense: I should have known that Google's starkness was actually a blank canvas asking me to leave my mark. I planned on doing it but it wasn't until Dave mention it that I set to task.

To my delight, as David said, it was easy to do and cool. While all the gadgets are both neat and useful, the best part was being able to add a tab for new pages and load each with a selection of RSS feeds. In addition to the home page, I added a page with French news and another with culinary feeds. I love how I can with one click get to information I want with out having to do a search. Since I customized, when I go to my browser which loads the Google search page, I have a customized page but not access to the other pages: for that, I still need to log into my account to view my other pages. I find this inconvenient: I wish it would just load automatically without having to sign in. Today I realized though that once I sign into iGoogle, I can access gmail without having to sign in again.

I wonder however if I search the web after having signed into iGoogle, is Google able to keep better track of my habits than if I used the search engine without signing in? I wonder..

One RSS step further : I also went and explored the Google Reader and decided to set up my reader. It was easy to set up my RSS feeds.

Now all I need to do is make it a habit to use all this convenient technology!