Google reader

Can you tell we're back to normal life now? I have time to BLOG again! It's 4:15 Monday afternoon and I'm actually looking for stuff to do! I suppose I could wash my floors or something, but I just did that Saturday. And I can't go visit anyone b/c Mattie is running a fever for 24 hours now. Anyway, I thought I'd share something cool that someone else shared with me...

Google has this new thing now. You can make igoogle your home page. (You don't have to have a google e-mail address to do this.) It's more than just the search engine on your customized page. You can customize the theme and add all sorts of things that are of interest to you: local new stories, foxnews.com stories, quotes of the day, sports stats, local gas prices, and the coolest thing for blog readers - google reader. Google reader lets you customize a list of blogs that you read, sign up for a "site feed," and updates that list when there are new posts added to your chosen blogs. So instead of checking the ten blogs you like to read, you just glance on your google homepage and it tells you if there are any new posts! It saves a lot of time waiting for web pages and blog servers to load, only to find out you already read the most recent post!

Here are the directions...
-Click here: http://www.google.com/ig
-Register for a google account or sign in with your present google ID.
-Add whatever you want to your customized page (you can change this anytime). If you have a few minutes, look under all the sections. There are tons of things to put on your page...free itunes, Bible verse of the day, Bible search engine, flylady reminder of the day (easy non-overwhelming way to de-clutter!), calculators, moon phases, local weather, etc.
-Google reader is under the tools menu. (It says "google reader (labs)" for some reason.) Once you add google reader, you add the specific blogs you'd like. Most of them are added by copying the URL (web address) of the blog in to the appropriate section when prompted. (Open up another tab, navigate to the first blog to add, once the page is showing, copy and paste the address in the original tab. Then do this for second blog, etc. Opening up the extra tab makes it a lot quicker to do.) For homechoolblogger, the blog has to have "my RSS info" available in order to do a site feed. Not sure why.

So clear as mud??? Just thought I'd share a neat feature that I love!