Steve Cherrier

After reading a great post on Lifehacker about a new iGoogle Themes directory. I use Google’s personalized home page for keeping up on RSS feeds, gmail, etc. and love it, but the few themes that were available were kinda lame.

I noticed at the bottom of the Lifehacker post a link to a iGoogle Skins Gadget that you can add to your homepage. If you use iGoogle. you should grab this gadget and you can select from dozens of themes (some of them pretty cool) and soup up your homepage.

The cool thing that I liked about the gadget is that it allows you to create your own themes! So I set out to work and created my first theme called Stormy Mountain. It’s a bit tricky to install, so if you’re interested, hit the full post to find out how to install it. Here’s a screenshot:

To install:

1. If you’ve never used iGoogle, just visit google.com and log in with your Gmail login/pass and then click “iGoogle” at the top right.
2. Grab the gadget here, and click “Add to Google” and make sure “See this gadget when you visit Google.com” is checked.
3. Go to the “Custom Skins” box now on your iGoogle page and you can see the skins in the directory tab. Just select one and boom, it will refresh to your new theme.
4. If you’d like to try out my skin (it hasn’t been approved to be added to the directory yet), you can click the “Options” button for that box (the little down arrow in the title bar by the – and x) and “Edit Settings:
5. In the “CSS file of test skin” put the following URL – http://vidguy-igoogle.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/stormymountain/stormy.css
6. Click save and it should refresh to my custom skin!

If you’re brave and adventurous and want to try out your own theme creation, visit the Google Developer guide for creating your own themes or the Custom Skin gadget site.