All Posts Tagged With: "291"

As more things begin to move online, it has become more important to have a centralized homepage of sorts to access all your information from one spot.  There are a variety of great options out there today, but so far I’ve found that iGoogle, Google’s homepage, has done the best job of filling my needs in this area.  

With that said, there is always room improvement with any product, and Greasemonkey has stepped in to fill that void with a variety of great scripts to change the behavior of iGoogle.   In order to use these, you will first need the Greasemonkey extension and the Firefox web browser installed on your computer.  

iGoogle Greasemonkey Scripts

• BeautyBlue - Nice blue theme for your iGoogle page.
• Google IG Max - Maximizes the removal of extra space to save room. Removes headers, footers, along with reducing the size of many elements on this page.
• More Rounded Corners - Allows you to round the corners of your modules.
• Remove Extra Space - Removes all the extra space on your iGoogle homepage.
• Remove the Header - Allows you to remove all module headers. You can also remove the footer with this script.
• Remove the Plus - Removes the + symbol next to each link within the modules.
• Replacing the Google Logo - Allows you to put any image where the iGoogle logo is (requires some hard coding).
• Resizeable Columns - Allows you to resize your homepage’s columns to look how you want.
• Transparencies - Makes the header image transparent to improve the look of your homepage.

Know of any good ones I’ve missed?  Let me know in the comments below!

I usually don’t do more than one technology talk a week, but a lot of great stuff is happening, so here is the second one in three days!

• Daily Blog Tips has released a new WordPress Plugin called Homepage Excerpts. This plugin gives you a large number of options, but its primary function is to allow you to convert all your older pages behind your homepage to only show excerpts of the posts. This has some SEO benefits, but will also improve the user experience as people try to find a particular post on your previous pages.
• Nirmal of Life Rocks gives us 10 Free Portable Applications for Bloggers. I thought I was pretty up on this stuff, but it looks like Thunderbird has a portable application which I didn’t know about. Thanks Nirmal!
• Web Worker Daily gives us 15 iGoogle Gadgets for Web Worker Productivity. I prefer iGoogle over other homepages, so I found this post particularly useful.
• CyberNet News covers the OpenOffice 2.3 Features. Even if you don’t use OpenOffice, it is good to cover the progress of this open source office suite as it looks to bridge the gap with Microsoft Office.
• CSS Juice gives us 13 Online Generators for Web 2.0 Design. I’ve actually used 3 of these at some point in the past, but had no idea this many existed. I try to keep them bookmarked for future reference.
• Mashable has a few more useful posts, including 110+ Thunderbird Themes and Extensions, 17 WordPress Plugins for Google Adsense, and 30+ 1-Column WordPress Themes.
• World Politics Review has produced a graph showing average broadband speed by country. It looks like the United States is quite a ways down the list with Japan and Korea heading up the list.
• Host M has a free CSS authoring tool called Simple CSS. I gave this a test run and it seems to work pretty well.
• PC World offers 20 Tools to Get the Junk Off Your PC.   This post includes several useful applications, many of which I wasn’t aware existed.