Make your home page work for you

I know many of you have customized home pages on Google, Yahoo or elsewhere. Some of you even "roll you own". In many cases I am guessing you have taken the defaults or did a bit of work on your page, but have you really tried to make the page work for you?

I have been spending some time on my iGoogle page to make it really be a valuable home page and portal to the information I want to keep up on and it has really started to take shape.

Let me share some of the things I have on my home page:

• Newspaper feeds from the Chicago Tribune, NY Times, WSJ, my local suburban newspapers, my home town newspaper, my wife's home town newspaper and the college newspaper from the college I went to.
• Magazine feeds from Time, Newsweek and Business Week
• Local Weather and Stocks I follow
• News services feeds from CNN, MSNBC and Reuters
• Feeds from our local schools
• Sports feeds on all of my favorite teams plus the main sports sources like ESPN and SI
• A full page on all of the technology feeds I follow including Mashable, SDTimes, WS & Technology and many others.
• Twitter Feeds from my company and several other sources I also follow on Twitter

I could go on, but the point is that bringing up my iGoogle page and skimming through all of the feeds I am easily able to keep up with what is important to me, plus being able to drill down and get the details as needed.

I have a similar strategy on my personal Twitter account, which allows me to catch up via either iGoogle or Twitter depending on what is easier and available on the device I have handy.

You can also have a similar strategy with Facebook, but the sources are not quite as numerous (yet), or you can use your favorite RSS reader.

The bottom line is no one need to be dependent on their local or national news or wait for delivery or their newspapers of choice, as the information is available 7 x 24 x 365.

This blog is available at http://technologyplumbing.blogspot.com, via RSS, Kindle, Facebook as well as Twitter to make it easy to follow no matter what your tool of choice is.