Setting up my Homepage

My New Homepage

My Google Home­page Setup

This is an arti­cle about my home­page setup. This is how I gen­er­ally browse the web when­ever I log on. Over the years, I’ve tried to make things more effi­cient. I spend a lot of time in front of the com­puter, so I’ve found a bunch of tips and tricks which makes life sim­pler. If you’re inter­ested in improv­ing your brows­ing habits, then great — please read on. If not, oh well — it’s no loss to me but it may be to you.

Back­ground

I used to be an avid Opera browser user. That is, until it started to glitch out on me and didn’t sup­port cer­tain fea­tures. As much as I liked Opera, I finally switched back to using Fire­fox as it was more widely sup­ported. Now, we can all debate about what is the best oper­at­ing sys­tem, browser, etc. — but keep in mind that a lot of my graph­ics appli­ca­tions unfor­tu­nately do not work on a Mac. And hence, that is one of my main rea­sons for not switch­ing over to an Apple. So I’m “stuck” with all of these browser options — Chrome, Safari, Inter­net Explorer, and even more — but for the sake of hav­ing some­thing which loads rel­a­tively fast and is widely sup­ported, I am stick­ing with Fire­fox (for now at least.)

There’s a few things which I install with every browser to opti­mize gen­eral effi­ciency in surf­ing habits. Prob­a­bly the most impor­tant, and one that’s bound to save you a ton of read­ing time and eye-strain is a Fire­fox exten­sion called Adblock Plus. If you don’t have it, install it — imme­di­ately. There’s noth­ing bet­ter than block­ing all the adver­tise­ments which peo­ple are try­ing to inun­date and brain­wash you with. That is the first and fore­most thing any­one with any shred of decency and self-respect should do with Firefox.

Recently, I encoun­tered an error with my per­son­al­ized home­page which pre­dates the Firefox-era. This home­page dated back to a time when Inter­net Explorer was my main browser of choice. I used to have a cus­tomized ver­sion of www.msn.com which when ‘signed in’ to MSN Live ser­vices, had all of my per­sonal book­marks, news feeds, weather, and other mis­cel­la­neous arti­cles. At first glance, I was appre­hen­sive of this page, but over time I actu­ally came to rely on it. All my impor­tant infor­ma­tion and head­lines was avail­able there at my fin­ger­tips. It cut down on the amount of time I spent surf­ing the web — and allowed me to quickly glance at what was tran­spir­ing around the globe within a mat­ter of sec­onds. But over the course of the last cou­ple of days my.msn.com sud­denly stopped work­ing. I sup­posed that this was done on pur­pose due to the tim­ing of the Win­dows 7 release. Of course, one can­not be entirely cer­tain. I tried to look up the out­age online, but didn’t turn up any results. On the other hand, the home­page still works on Inter­net Explorer — how­ever, I refuse to use IE other than to test my web­site designs across people’s screens.

So this ‘glitch’ went on for over a day. Then two days passed. I quickly real­ized that Microsoft prob­a­bly wasn’t going to ‘fix’ this any­time soon. I needed a fix — some­thing sim­i­lar to my old home­page. I knew Google had their own cus­tomized ver­sion called iGoogle which was sim­i­lar — how­ever the lay­out is quite gar­ish and ill-conceived. So just for kicks tonight, I decided to give it another try and see what I could do in order to make it read just as effi­ciently — and per­haps even bet­ter than what the old MSN home­page of mine pro­vided. I found that with a cou­ple sim­ple tricks, that I was able to do away with my old home­page and come up with some­thing leaps bet­ter while doing away with their poor (cur­rent) design.

Set­ting it up

1) The first thing to do is to log in or sign up for Google in order to access this page if you don’t already have one. Sign­ing up for Google gives an end-user access to a whole suite of use­ful tools and pref­er­ences. Check the upper-right hand cor­ner of your browser win­dow for the sign in page.

2) Once you have an account, log in/sign in to Google and head over to the iGoogle page.

3) You’ll notice that the main header and ban­ner at the top of screen takes up a tremen­dous amount of unnec­es­sary screen real-estate. In the mid­dle is a huge Google search box — this is redun­dant space for me as I use the Google Tool­bar (mostly to check web­site search opti­miza­tion and Pager­ank.) If you have a mon­i­tor that has a res­o­lu­tion above 1900 wide, any per­son­al­ized graph­ics you have in there also gets cut-off which makes it look even worse. There’s a sim­ple solu­tion for this — remove it entirely. And no, the Google devs do not want to make life eas­ier for you (I don’t think it’s inten­tional), so you have to find a workaround.

The solu­tion is quite sim­ple — down­load and install this free exten­sion called Grease­mon­key. Don’t worry — you don’t need to do any­thing else. You also really don’t need to know what it does — it just makes other things work…: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Then install this exten­sion as well ‘iGoogle Header Remover’: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24339

Prob­lem solved.

4) You may want to cus­tomize your actual page now. In the upper-right hand cor­ner of your iGoogle home­page is a but­ton which reads ‘Add Stuff».’ Click that and you can add var­i­ous items to your home­page. I include the weather fore­cast, cal­en­dar and time, my abbre­vi­ated Face­book feed, the NPR Radio, my per­sonal book­marks, the news I like to read, arti­cles, and gadget-related web­sites. I’m still not fin­ished — I may add a Google Voice so I can text mes­sage peo­ple for free. Have fun adding what you like.

At the begin­ning of this arti­cle, I included a screen­shot of my browser win­dow after hav­ing made all of these changes. Keep in mind, I have a 24″ mon­i­tor set to 1900 pix­els wide for graph­ics works– so you may have to scroll through the image in order to see the full page.

5) You may notice that I have an extra col­umn — four instead of the three. Again, the Google devs don’t want to make life easy for you and they don’t pro­vide this as an option. If you like your three columns — keep it that way. If you don’t and want to squeeze in four columns instead, then read this arti­cle: http://www.mickschroeder.com/2009/06/howto-add-4th-column-in-igoogle/

6) Last but not least, you’ll notice a thin col­umn on the far-left which takes up pre­cious screen real-estate. I don’t use the Google Chat func­tion. The rest of the stuff there is also redun­dant. Google should pro­vide this col­umn as optional, but they don’t. So if you want to remove it, install this exten­sion called ‘iGoogle Tab Remover’: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10113

And that should be about it. Any time you want to add addi­tional con­tent to the page, just dis­able the ‘iGoogle Tab Remover’ — Upper tool­bar: Tools­Dis­able iGoogle Tab Remover and reload your page. Enable it again when you think you’re all set.