R Culbertson> hmm, when did they add themes to Google Personalized Home Page?
That started me on a new wow with Google. It turns out they snuck in a new feature to allow one to personalize their “personalized homepage” with themes (look on the right hand side). [Edit: Note that the screeny changed (doesn't look the thumbnail did) and I now know not to upload two images with the same name... on the same day]
Whenever I get a new cell phone, the first thing I do is change the background theme. It seems like such a small thing, but for whatever reason adding a beach or a dancing pig or something else makes me feel like it’s my own.
We wanted to offer you a way to add some personality to your Google homepage, too, but we had to ask ourselves some tough questions. How do we add personality without taking away from the information? How do we make sure people don’t get sick of looking at the same theme every day?
Today we’re releasing six themes for the personalized homepage that try to solve these challenges: a city, a teahouse (super cute — this one is my favorite), a winter scene, a sky, a beach and a bus stop. All of our themes are dynamic: they change with your own local time of day, current weather conditions or season. If you add the beach theme, for example (changes with time of day), it will ask you for your Zip code and adjust itself to match your local sunrise and sunset times. So if you happen to be stuck in a windowless office, you can at least crack open a cold one and watch the sun set over your desktop.
You can add a theme by first setting up a personalized homepage. One your homepage is set up, click the “Select Theme” link on the right-hand side of the page. From there you can choose between the classic theme and the six new themes we’ve designed. We hope this feature makes the Google homepage feel a little more like, well, home.
We implemented our themes using a CSS framework so we can scale, and plan to push out many new themes beyond these six.
And what’s cooler is that they didn’t just add some stock headers or bandwidth wasting annoying junk. They allow one to link the header to your address so that for example. The header I have posted up above. That sun will move according to the time of day across the sky (and make me long for Hawaii). Plus with it being CSS they allow for a LOT of customization, and I can’t wait to see what else pops up.
Tags: Art, Design, Google, Interesting
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