RSS, Google, and You!

OK, I have to admit I've never really been a big fan of RSS. For those of you tuning in from home, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS allows news or news-like sites to syndicate their content so that you can view articles from many different sites at once from the same place (or so that is my humble understanding of it all). I have shied away from this technology because it usually requires that you have an RSS reader, sometimes called an aggregator. I don't like to have 15 million different programs to get the information I want and as such I have deemed it easier to just bookmark my favorite news sites rather than open an RSS reader and THEN read the articles.

Well, yesterday I noticed that Google had launched their version of the “Personal Home Page”.  I was skeptical at first, because one of the biggest reasons I use Google as my home page is that it is clean.  I don’t have a bunch O crap cluttering up my search page.  But, since Google is to search engines what Apple is to portable music players, I figured I’d try it out.  I was absolutely amazed, this is some slick stuff!  You can have all of this usefull information on your otherwise barren Google page, and you can have RSS feeds as well.  I tried out the RSS feeds from Tom’s Hardware Guide and AnandTech and, well… I’m sold.  Instead of having to go to these sites each day, I can get the headlines from their articles right on my home page.  In the event that one interests me, I simply click on the link and I’m there.  Cool…


To start out, click on the “Personalized Home” link on the upper-right corner of Google’s home page.  This will bring up a couple of sample items that you can have.  To remove any item, click on it’s boxed “X”, or to edit an item, click “edit” (not available for all items).  To add content to the page, click on “Personalize your Google homepage” on the left side.  To re-arrange, simply drag-and-drop.  I highly recommend signing up for a Google account so that you can save your settings.  Once you sign in, you can tell Google to remember you on your computer so that you don’t have to log in every time you open your browser.


To add an RSS feed, click on the “Add Content” link on the upper-left corner of the page.  Click on “Create a Section” at the bottom and type in the RSS feed URL.  For this website, you would type in “http://home.swindlercave.com/index.xml”.  Click the “Go” button and you’re all set!  You can customize the section by clicking the “edit” link and specifying how many articles to display (the default is 3).  Cool, huh?