Sure, I had my iGoogle start page with a few sites I followed: Lifehacker, Slashdot, and a friend’s blog or two, and that worked fine. That is, until I saw Bradley Robb speak at WordCamp in Richmond. In his presentation, he advised bloggers of the importance of RSS, and setting up Google alerts to get the latest news from the topics they’re most interested in. And my whole outlook on RSS changed.

So like a good little blogger, I rushed home, setup my Google Reader account, and made a few generic alerts: “photoshop tutorials,” “illustrator tutorials,” “graphic design” and “web development.” Within an hour I had over 100 new items to sort through. Yeah, there was a lot of noise, and Bradley warned us of the signal-to-noise ratio…and assured me that the process of refining keywords would help. And it did.

But still, I had subscribed to a number of RSS feeds since the event; I was begining to suffer from Information overload. Something needed to be done. And Google Reader’s ugly interface wasn’t helping.

I downloaded the Flock browser, which helped to manage all of my social media accounts, but didn’t really deliver feeds in any sort of useful way. And then I found Feedly.

Feedly is like a magazine for your RSS feeds. You are given multiple views for your data: Cover, latest articles, and Digest (my personal favorite). It delivers news to you in a way that doesn’t make you feel overwhelmed by it. It brings the joy back to reading the news.

After installing the add-on (Firefox, Flock), you will be asked to provide your google reader information. This may (reasonably) turn some of you off to the service, but there IS a reason they ask for it: Feedly will tie in with your Google Reader account, and stay synchronized with it. In addition, it makes use of some of Google Reader’s features.

Once you tie your accounts together, you will begin to see your pages fill up. To the left is an example of what my digest page looks like (click for full view). As you can see, it pulls in my feeds, and lays them out in a mash-up format that’s a little more visually appealing than your typical RSS Reader (you can also view each feed source individually if that’s more your style). Tie it to your Twitter account, and you will find your Twitter stream and the top trends in addition to your featured (favorited) news sources. Further down the page, you will also find a break down of your feeds by topic and source, who is following you (in Google Reader), and an interesting little “Explore” section, where you are given site feeds that seem to do a good job of relating to your topics of interest. For media streams (photo/video feeds), it does a good job at laying them out in album format.

What else does Feedly do? Besides basic Google Reader functionality (sharing, favoriting), how about integrating with your FriendFeed account to share with that network? Facebook? It does the same there. Twitter: same. Delicious also plays nicely (as you would expect). It even does a good job of hooking into Digg so you can tune into whatever inane chatter is going on over there about what you’re reading. And all sharing services also allow for you to add your own annotations, which is nice.

So give Feedly a test drive at http://www.feedly.com. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and already find myself getting more out of my RSS feeds.

And then I found CandyBar (Shareware, $29). Candybar lets you customize not just any icon on your computer, but also your dock’s appearance.

And for those of you without the time or patience to make your own, there are many icon sets available for free at Iconfactory (You’ll want to download the iContainers)

Also check out some of these creative themes.

If you would like to see a walk-thru on how this wallpaper was made, would like to see more wallpapers or just want to post your favorite wallpaper resource, let’s hear it in the comments. Click “Read more” to access the download link.

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1920×1600, 1.5 MB