Friday, May 20, 2005

What's an "IG?"

iGoogle? Dunno. Whatever, Google now has a personalization page.

Here's the first screen (http://www.google.com/ig):


When you click on "Get started personalizing your Google homepage," here's what you get:


Then when you save your preferences, you get something like this:


While the presentation is simple there are some subtleties that aren't immediately obvious. For example, when you login, you're obviously logged into Gmail but also into Google Groups and Google News. You can arrange the items on the page with drag and drop.

Google is up to something...

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Blogger Web Pages

I've been working with the president of our home owners' association on setting up a domain name and web site for our home owners' association. What we plan to do with it is to have a place to put a list of city numbers, officers' names and contact information and occasional updates about cookouts and garage sales.

He registered the domain name and before he contracted for a web server I asked him to let me play with blogger.com. I had used Blogger to create a web page for my mother to use as a home page. Previously, I had hand-crafted a web page giving her a list of web sites that she often visits. To change it, I had to go to her house. Instead, I created a new blog and hacked away at the template to take away most of the blog "stuff" and to only show the latest entry. Now I can go to blogger.com and edit that entry and it will show up as her home page the next time she starts Internet Explorer. I can even do it from work.

Anyway, back to the home owners' association site. The way the president described it, he wanted 3 columns. Blogger's standard templates don't have 3 columns so how did I find one? Google of course! The one I chose to use is here. I played with it a little to make the right column look like the left column. I'm a long way from done but you can see the work in progress here.

The other thing I've done using Blogger is to invite the president to be a member of this blog. This way he can post to it himself. All I have to do is maintain the template if names and contact information change.

I'm even looking at using the technique described here to publish the subdivision's covenants.

Stay tuned!