If you’re anything like me and you spend a lot of time online, you might find it convenient to have live feeds from your favourite websites and information services sent through to a central page where you can easily peruse what’s happening in the world. Two very nifty bits of technology in the form of RSS and iGoogle make that really easy.

The first thing I’m going to assume is that you all know what Google is and that if you have a Google account (like a Gmail email address) you also know how to create an iGoogle page. If you don’t know what iGoogle is have you considered Googling it?

OK, so you’ve got an iGoogle page and you also have a few websites that you regularly check on to see what’s happening. How can you make the latest information from your favourite sites appear on your iGoogle page?

If the site you visit is providing an RSS feed you should see something like this in the address field of the browser (I am a Firefox user so this is how it looks in that browser. It may appear elsewhere in other browsers):

Once you’ve clicked the RSS icon on a website that has a feed you’ll see the following:

Note that there are a few options on where you can send the feed. We are going to send it to Google.

Above is the next screen you will see and all you have to do now is click on the “Add to Google homepage button.

Now, when you navigate to your iGoogle page, which I have set as my homepage, you will see the feed appearing in what Google calls a “gadget” box on the page. The screenshot above shows my current homepage. You’ll see that I have subscribed to a few blogs using RSS/iGoogle, a few news websites, some customised Gumtree searches (just follow the same procedure described above when you have a specific search on Gumtree) and I also have a weather gadget for Durban.

What’s nice about this iGoogle page is that you can drag the gadgets around and arrange them the way you want, plus you can control how many stories get published into each gadget simply by editing each one’s settings. For instance if a website doesn’t publish a lot of stories you can reduce the number shown in the gadget, or increase it up to 9 stories. There are also a few other customisations available depending on the type of RSS feed that is offered by your favourite site.

You could even subscribe to this very blog using exactly this procedure.

Recently

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.