Tech For Free!

How awesome would it be to access your email, calendar, news, favorite blogs & websites, social networks, and more in one central location regardless of which computer you are using? Wouldn’t it be even more awesome if you could set all that up by yourself…..for FREE. You can! It’s fast, easy, and you don’t need to have any special tech skills. The solution is “iGoogle,” brought to you by none other than Google.

Prerequisite
You need to have, or sign up for, a Google email address, otherwise know as Gmail. If you don’t have one and are fighting the need to have one, you should read a recent post I made about why you need a Gmail account. Gmail is FREE and the key to unlocking access to many great free tools from Google.

Example

Customize
Add widgets for sites you access more than once a day.

1. To get started visit http://www.google.com. On the top right side of the screen is a link to sign-in. Click the link. You’ll be taken to a new page where you will sign-in with your Gmail address and password.
2. Once logged in you will be taken to a page that has some widgets that Google selected for you. Let’s get rid of them so we have a clean slate to work with. To do this, go to each widget and click the triangle that points down and select “Delete this gadget.”
3. Click on the “Add stuff” link (top right of screen). As you can see on the page returned to you, there are a number of pre-made widgets. You can search for widgets by scrolling through each page, or narrow your search through use of the “search for gadgets” box. To add a widget from the list, click on “Add it now.” If you’re not sure which one to pick don’t worry because, as you already know, removing widgets is easy.
4. To turn your favorite blog into a widget click “Add feed for gadget” (left side of the screen) and enter the blog’s url, and click “Add”. TIP: For some reason the link to add feeds or gadgets disappears after you do a search so you may need to use the Back button in your browser to return to the first search page to access the add feed link.
5. Craig’s List and Twitter, along with many other sites, offer RSS feeds of search results. Visit either site and conduct your search as normal. Next look for the orange RSS icon on the search results page (bottom right for both sites) and click it. Copy the url from the address bar, revisit iGoogle, and repeat step 4. Be sure to change “feed://” to “http://” when pasting the url into the box. Now you have a constant and current view of search results. If you are job hunting this is one way to automate your job search.
6. Lastly, we all have sites we need to visit regularly that don’t have pre-made widgets or offer RSS feeds. Instead of relying upon bookmarks in our browser, we are going to rely upon a bookmark widget so that we have everything we need in one central location. Follow the instructions for step 3 (search for bookmarks).

Now that you are done adding widgets visit your iGoogle page (click “Back to iGoogle Home”) and you should now see all of the widgets you added. You can drag/drop them into different columns and also specify how much information you want to see per widget by clicking the triangle on the widget and then selecting “edit settings”.

I told you it would be awesome….all the essentials on one page!