#cam23: iGoogle tip

Did you know you can restore backed-up versions of your iGoogle page?  A few weeks ago the Google servers had the hiccups and appeared to have wiped everything off my iGoogle page.  But I discovered that you can restore automatically-saved backups very simply.  I thought it might be useful to share what I learnt.

Here's what to do:

1) Go to the tab editing page by clicking next to the little arrow next to the tab name, and then 'edit this tab'

2) Scroll to the bottom of the page, select the backup date and time you'd like to restore, and click on 'restore now'. Bingo: crisis averted.

"Who will not change a raven for a dove?"

Well, what a difference a day or two makes...

With a little more time to play with iGoogle I realised that it really wasn't going to meet my RSS needs. Although it can bring together several feeds on one page, they're still spatially disparate - you have to look at each one in turn to see what's there. Looking at them on one page is quicker than loading up each page from my bookmarks, but it's still not ideal. More annoyingly, I couldn't work out how, at a glance, to see which things were new, and which weren't.

The links I've followed to source have gone purple (though that's not very clearin this screen shot), to show that they're visited links, but they wouldn't be if I were logging in from a different computer, or if my browser history on this computer had been deleted. And what about those stories I've looked at in the reader and not followed? I don't want to have to remember what I've seen and not seen - I want the tool to do that for me, and to show me clearly what's new!

Things *are* clearer when I expand the gadget - the new items are dark, and the read ones are pale. But to check this out, I have to expand each widget in turn.


If you're still reading this far, you've probably guess where this is going... a feed reader. LottieMSmith recommended that I try Bloglines. I'm afraid I didn't follow that advice, and simply because I didn't want to set up yet another new account right now (having created all-new email and Google accounts for 23 Things). Despite my qualms about being logged into Google all the time (it feels a bit like selling my soul, somehow), I've set up a Google Reader account, and am loving it.

Although it isn't immediately obvious where some of the features are, there's facility to organise feeds into folders (hurrah for more categorisation!), and you can choose to see all your new stories together in one window, or by folder, or for each individual feed. The overview of your folders and feeds on the left-hand side quickly shows you what's new where, and the overall feel is definitely of the internet coming to me, and not vice versa.

Things 1 and 2: "A surfeit of the sweetest things"

This post is a veritable feat of Things, as for Thing 4 we're blogging about our experience doing Things 1 and 2. Up later there'll be a post about doing Thing 4. Hopefully that won't be followed with a post about posting about doing Thing 4, because that might get a bit silly...

Things 1 and 2 were setting up, building and adding RSS feeds to an iGoogle page.


Here's the header of my iGoogle 23 Things tab. It might look a bit familiar as I've customised the iGoogle page and this blog in similar ways. Being able to customize the look of tools makes a big difference to me. I've never liked using default or standard designs for my computer desktop, for example, and with these tools I don't really feel like using them unless I like the way they look.

I've set up a number of different tabs - home, work, chartership and 23 Things - to reflect the different sorts of resources I use for different things. I've been mindful of the comment that the gadets can take a while to load, so I'll be trying to keep the number of gadets on each page quite low. It's not necessarily easy to divide everything neatly into boxes; like the Mongoose Librarian, I'd count myself as one of the "people who like to compartmentalise their lives", but I also agree with Lottie at Adventures of a Librarian that it's all a bit more complicated than that.

I'll probably soon add a tab (or tabs) for all my personal, non-work interests - the list of sites I like to check frequently is getting longer and longer and worthwhile causes keep getting forgotten. I really ought to try out Google Reader keeping track of the numerous blogs I follow; it seems to be what many people use, but it somehow feels a bit like cheating to let a tool like that do that hard work of checking for me!

One of my tabs is ominously labelled 'Chartership' as this is where I'm keeping the sort of feeds that I've promised in my PPDP that I'll read, inwardly digest, and maybe even comment on. I've also added a bookmark to the CILIPfuture Netvibes page, and used the Feedcombine tool it uses to create a combined feed from the CILIP Conversation blog and the communities forums in the same tab. This is as much investigation of Netvibes that I've done, but it does look like a very useful tool for bringing together lots of sources in one place and I'll be back to look at it some more.


In my 23 Things tab I've included the press release feed from the British Library and the Library of Congress main blog feed. The LoC has several blogs and even more news services, covering all its areas of work, and I was quite tempted to add them all. But, discretion being the better part of valour, I've just signed up for one and will see if I actually read it before I sign up for any more. I'm also going to keep a look out for other, smaller, blogging libraries to see how they use a blog and whether I think it's effective.

Finally, I'm using the To Do List gadget to note down ideas and things to mention in blog posts. So if I'm getting a bit verbose, then blame iGoogle!