PaulSpoerry.com

Google’s personalized homepage is wicked cool. It lets you run widgets, which are basically mini-applications within your home page. For instance, on mine I have several RSS feeds, a weather module, a To-Do list (actually a few because I use different lists for different things - so I have the Google To-Do and Remember The Milk and Toodledo), Google calendar, GMail, etc. What you’ll find as you add modules though is that some can seriously slow down your homepage performance. I tend to keep my RSS feeds to only the ones I think are the most important, and I try to only use WELL KNOWN coders (like the folks from Remember the Milk) or gadgets directly from Google. The problem is… finding GOOGLE created gadgets can seem daunting because all the gadgets are just jumbled in there together. The handy thing about the Google Homepage Content Directory is that it’s powered by… Google. So you can easily search it. From the Content Directory just search for google.com, and that will display gadgets made by Google. Or just use this link and it will bring them up for you: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?num=24&q=google.com. Some of the gadgets I’ve personally used and find useful are:

• GMail
• Google Calendar
• Weather
• Map Search
• ToDo List
• Torrent Search

Just remember that if it’s made by Google, it will have google.com in the address list under the gadget. Gadgets not created by Google will provide a warning that they were not created by the big G. There’s nothing wrong with running non-Google made gadgets, but you don’t always know what you’ll be getting. My personal recommendation is to avoid gadgets who’s homepage is a free service like Geocities.

You can also check out GoogleModules, which is not affiliated with Google but allows you to search for gadgets by tags. While you customizing your homepage, check out my other post about the new Google Homepage Themes available.