Making your personalized homepage even more personal

The holidays have passed, but if you're anything like me, you've got a gold mine of bear hugs and embarrassing moments captured on film. My holidays wouldn't be the same without Tabby, our family cat, who has been part of the winter festivities for 10 years. Over the holidays, we caught Tabby sticking out his tongue at the family get-together! Below is one of those prized moments I wanted to post everywhere, including on my personalized homepage:


Now, you too can capture memories and images on your iGoogle homepage by building a custom theme. We've just released our new tool for creating iGoogle themes. It's an easy way for iGoogle users to spruce up their personalized homepage without needing to know how to use XML, etc. All you need is an image, and we'll provide the rest.

The theme-building tool has a simple interface for uploading your photo from your desktop, Picasa Web Album, or the web. Once you've chosen a photo, the builder provides a basic set of tools to help you create your theme:

• Image Cropping - Crop your favorite photo to fit your iGoogle theme
• Color Schemes - Pick colors to complement your photo
• Real-time Preview - See immediate feedback of your changes to swiftly fine-tune your theme
• Public and Private Publishing - Choose who gets to see your original themes, whether it's just you, or if you want to share them with the world

Once your theme is created, it's immediately added to your iGoogle page for you to enjoy.

We hope you have fun customizing your iGoogle homepage with your favorite images, whether they're photos of your pets or places you've visited, drawings, designs, cartoons — or whatever else your heart desires.

Update on 1/16 @ 10:30 AM: A number of people are having trouble accessing our theme-builder tool. We're currently working on the issue, and we'll post here as soon as it's up and running again. We're sorry for the delay, and we'd like to thank everyone who let us know they had trouble accessing this feature.

Update on 1/22 @ 4:25 PM: Our theme-builder tool is now available to anyone in the U.S. who has their language default set to English, and we hope to release this feature in other languages and countries soon. Thanks for bearing with us, and we'll keep you posted on further updates.

Posted by Kathleen Ko, iGoogle Engineer