replacing igoogle/chrome themes

October 13, 2013 5:24 PM

This is a little silly but is still trufax: The thing I will miss the most about iGoogle going away is the Tea House.

Right now my iGoogle homepage is pretty sparse, so I don't need, like a replacement hub-o-life. HOWEVER, I've been watching the daily adventures of the little Tea House Fox for forever, and having a little time-shifty, very chill homepage has been really awesome.

What can I use instead for my homepage? I'm looking for something:

1. That changes over the course of a day
2. That's got a regular pattern (like, the fox goes on the lake at a certain time, has lunch, etc etc)
3. Is pretty and soothing

posted by spunweb to Technology (7 answers total)

If you use gmail, do you know you can set the teahouse as a theme for that as well? I don't know if it is going to go away too when iGoogle does, but if not, you can still get your fox fix by having gmail always open (set it as your homepage).
posted by lollusc at 5:53 PM on October 13, 2013

Response by poster: Oh, that's the other thing -- I don't use gmail during my working day because it's distracting to my writing process.
posted by spunweb at 6:49 PM on October 13, 2013

Best answer: Is it worth creating a second Gmail account? Just the account--no contacts, nothing. Log in, set theme, and then you have a relatively blank screen with your little fox friend. (Who, yes, omg, is adorable.)

This may or may not be a thing I've done before when I really had to have access to email for one specific thing, but couldn't deal with having my whole inbox as a distraction.
posted by MeghanC at 7:50 PM on October 13, 2013

I feel like I could have written this for mrs. mmascolino except she loves the adventures of the frog and lady bug. Sadly I don't see a gmail theme for them. Does anyone have a suggestion for that?
posted by mmascolino at 9:35 PM on October 13, 2013

You can try Netvibes, where someone is offering the same style (although I'm not sure it changes the images depending on the time of day).
posted by KMB at 1:34 AM on October 14, 2013

Response by poster: :( No it doesn't, but thank you very much for the suggestion.
posted by spunweb at 11:16 AM on October 15, 2013

Best answer: ustart.org has some seriously cute themes that change over the day! <3 <3 <3
posted by spunweb at 7:58 PM on November 4, 2013