"The Personalized Home Page: A New Tool for Keeping Up"
by Tom Goodman
August 3, 2006

The internet is a great source of information, but it’s useful only if you have ways to manage all that information.  I’ve discovered one way to do this through the Google Personalized Home Page.

When I open my web browser, the first thing I see is a page of links from web pages that I have chosen: news from around the world, local weather, selected weblogs, my Netflix account status, and so on.  The page allows me to check the content on various websites all on one page.  I can then click the headlines of items that interest me, and the browser will go to the website where that headline and story can be found.

Here’s how to set up your Google Personalized Home Page:

First, go to www.google.com.  On the upper right corner, click on “Personalized Home.”  A sample personalized home page will appear, with some content already provided (weather, Google news, the New York Times, and so on).  Click “Make it your own” and you will see a box where you can check and uncheck from a sampling of content.  Select what interests you.  You can always add or delete content later.  Then click “Show my page.”

Next, on the upper left of your new personalized page, click the “Add content” line.  You can now select the websites you’d like to add to your home page.  If you already know the web address (the URL), click on the line “Add by URL” (it’s next to the “Search Homepage Content” button).

Here are some web addresses you might want to add by URL:

http://christianheadlines.com/bookmarks/ (a site of headlines featuring religious news)