My Wet Coast Life

My 4th theme has finally been published by iGoogle and i thought i would showcase them here because you'll have a very hard time hunting for them due to iGoogle's newest theme category is done broke and until recently fixed, had the inability to find theme when searching...even by the theme's name

What? Did I just say Google is broken? Well, sort of...
Google provides iGoogle which is a way to customize your own Google homepage with a bunch of gadgets. These can range from news and sports, to quotes and weather. If your a programmer with basic XML knowledge (or you can even use a tool), you can make your own theme. You can even make it so the theme changes based on time of day and/or day of the week.

For the last couple months, the Newest iGoogle themes category has been broken and not showing new themes (but i doubt those theme submitted will be complaining). Then you couldn't search for your theme unless you knew one or two magical words in your description because anything else would yield no results. It could have been the word "is", "the", etc... but use something actually related and buried in pages upon pages of results. The search issue was only recently fixed but the newest category issue still exists.

I find this funny that one of, if not the, world's biggest search engine's own search and services is broken, or at least a service is broken and for so long. The group setup for iGoogle Themes tends to not really get a response and lately just gets more spam than help (You'd think Google with all there power would have developed better spam protection for its users forums and groups. Just saying...) And in the end, if you do get a response, it tends to be you getting pointed to the iGoogle section of the Web Search Help Forum at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search?hl=en where it is more likely to be seen by someone at Google. *sigh*

Are you affected by the iGoogle newest theme category fail?

Luckily, submissions are still working but take about 4-6 weeks to show up. Drawback is, you don't know when it is added (hey Google, why not notify us, you have our email in the XML??) and there are a lot of themes in iGoogle and with the Newest sections broken, no one will even find it unless they were searching and happen to match something in your description.

Well, now that that is out of the way, on to my 4 themes...

Follow up:

My first theme i did when i couldn't sleep one night in 2008 and the funny thing was the theme end up being Coffee Beans of all things. I uploaded it to Google expecting it to be rejected but my coding sufficed and it actually got accepted. Once approved, it even jumped quickly to a couple thousand users. Not what i was expecting but not going to say no to. BTW, the newest theme category was working then and only broke sometime in late summer/fall 2009.

So being a user of iGoogle myself, it was fall 2008 and i wanted a cool, clean winter look with a blue tone to it and there was nothing available that i liked. So i decided to make my next theme, Blue Ice. It has had up to a couple thousand users but usually only during fall and winter months.

In the fall of 2009, i wanted a unique black and white style theme to match my black themed desktop at home and at work and that is where DC Metro underground theme came to be designed. Mainly black and white with red highlights, it has been my start page for the last couple months and i still like it. This one was designed more out of personal taste and preference than for everyone else on the net and due to the iGoogle newest section being broken, it looks like that is how it is going to remain as it has been up for a couple months now and has not passed 100 users and doubt it ever will. C'est la vie.

Now for my 4th. This was spawned out of my enjoyment of watching illwillpress.com's Foamy the Squirrel. Between Foamy's rants on anything from calling tech support to video game achievements to one of my favorites, comics and movies. So i checked the iGoogle directory and alas, no Foamy theme, nothing, nadda thing... What? Hope could this be? Surely there is some Foamy fan that has beaten me to the punch but i guess i was wrong. Well, this situation needed to be corrected. After spending a couple days thinking of different ways to hail Foamy when my browser pops open I decided to make this theme clean and simple looking and not too busy. I also needed to ensure it was safe for work but still give me a laugh every time my browser opens showing this little .

Well, today they finally approved it, My Foamy Fan theme showing Foamy trying to give you that last warning before entering your search and Pillz-E on the left doing the "i told you not to search for it..." I hope you and all the Foamy fans out there like it!

I don't care if no one else uses this theme as this will help me on those days when I just need a good laugh. But yet again, it is nice for other to enjoy your work. Maybe Google will get its act together and devote a tiny bit of time to fix the newest theme category...one can only hope.

What do you think of my themes?

Do you have any suggestions for my next theme or need one created?