Dave Briggs

Have spent a little time playing with a couple of Google products which have changed since I last used them – both for the better. Firstly, Google Reader, which was rubbish before, and now is a lot better. As is probably obvious, it’s an online RSS aggregator, like BlogLines (only a bit worse). It’s had a pretty thorough makeover, all of which makes it quicker and more user friendly. It won’t become my regular feed reader (FeedDemon at home and BlogLines on the move) but I’ll keep an eye on it. It has another use though, which I mention below…

The other thing I played with was the personalised home page. You can now have more than one page of stuff, which is nice, not least because the range of things you can do now has increased. I have set mine to to have one page with my Gmail, Calendar, BBC News headlines, del.icio.us bookmarks, and some useful searches:

Then a second page with some feeds that I regularly scan, along with a Google Reader summary of all my feeds, so I can quickly check what’s new.

The third and last page has a few games on it that have become available. Plenty of oppotunities for wasted minutes there…

I’ve added the personalised homepage to my FireFox startup pages – it’s pretty useful.

Note: I wrote this post, as I do all of mine these days, using the BlogJet editor. It automatically generated the thumbnails shown above, which is pretty cool, and makes my life easier…