Here we are at day three and already I'm forced to talk about the death of things dear to me. No, not Andy Griffith (though, I did see my fair share of him when my dad went through his Matlock phase in the early 90s).

For over half a decade, iGoogle has been the sight that has greeted me as I started my browser and many times when I clicked the "home" button of my browser (a button I've had to explicitly enable in Chrome). But soon, this will be no more.

Now, I'd had a hunch that iGoogle was getting less than stellar treatment lately as it became very difficult to make iGoogle my default page for google.com and also when its design was broken through their extensive redesigning. Perhaps the personal web portal is passe at this point, but I will surely miss it. iGoogle has provided me with an at-a-glance preview of my mail and a handful of other website snippets since its inception in 2005.

To be fair, I've been using less and less of the gadgets (or whatever they call them), slowly being culled down from my email and RSS feeds from various websites and webcomics to just mail, a deviantArt gadget that I don't pay attention to anymore, and the RSS feed from my brother's comic. Outside of the casual overview of my email, I don't really take advantage of functionality of iGoogle anymore as I've moved away to better, dedicated applications and sites such as Google Reader and the ever present reddit.

But, I'm a programmer, dammit! I can build myself a site that not only provides the same functionality I used before, but make it better, faster, stronger, and more tailored to my needs! I have sixteen months to replace the death row inmate that is iGoogle and replace it I shall.

I shall...