If you’re like me (and God help you if you are), you have an iGoogle home page set up at www.google.com/ig that displays all of your favorite newsfeeds, weather, etc. You may even have gone so far as to create a custom theme using the new ‘theme maker’ or are using one of the thousands of (slightly tacky) themes already available.

In addition to that, you may be slightly OCD about organizing your stuff into multiple tabs…me, I have 18 (Mac, general, news, tech, politics, etc, and so on).

Combine those two aspects and you’ll soon discover that if you find a theme you like, you’ll need to go to each tabs settings page to change it manually – a process that takes several clicks and ridiculous amounts of page load time.

However, I, being the brilliant mind that i am, have found a way to edit them all at one time – saving time and energy. Here’s how.

NOTE – the short techy version is this: export your iGoogle settings, which are simple XML. Find the ‘old’ theme url and replace with the ‘new’. Save, re-import.

The long, step by step version follows:

Step One: Log into your iGoogle homepage.

Step Two: Click the ‘down’ arrow beside your top most tab, then click ‘Edit this tab’.
  

Step Three: Change this tab to the theme you want to use using the ‘change theme’ link.
  

Step Four: On the bottom right of the page, choose ‘Save’. Then come back to the settings page using steps 1 & 2.

Step Five: Click the ‘Manually backup your iGoogle page’ button in case something goes horribly wrong and you really screw things up in the following steps (I kid, I kid – you can’t break things too badly).

Step Six: Click the ‘Export iGoogle settings to your computer’ button marked ‘Export’. This will download a file to your computer called ‘iGoogle-Settings.xml’.
  

Step Seven: Open a text editor (for Windows, use Notepad, for Mac, TextEdit). Open the file you downloaded. It will look very complicated and dangerous. It is, so don’t tease it.

Step Eight: In the text file, look for a line like this:
<Tab title=”Home” skinUrl=”http://www.derekhoug.com-a.googlepages.com/iGoogle-osx.xml”>
Your ’skinUrl’ address will probably be different – but the text in between the quotes is the important part.

In your text editor, copy the ‘old’ value, then do a ‘find and replace’ – in Notepad, ‘ctrl-h’, in TextEdit ‘cmd-f’. In the ‘find’ field, use the old value, in the ‘replace’ field, use the new value. Click ‘replace all’ to change all of your themes at once.

Basically you are telling your text editor to find the old text and replace it with the new text.

Step Nine: After making the change, save the file.

Step Ten: In your iGoogle settings page, scroll to the bottom and choose ‘Import iGoogle settings from a file’. Browse to the file you were just working on, then choose ‘Upload’. After the upload is complete, choose ‘Save’ in the bottom right of the iGoogle settings page.

Congratulations: all of your tabs now have the same theme and you have saved yourself about 2000 clicks and a few precious minutes.
  

You’re welcome.