Available for Android and iOS, Google Currents is a great platform for catching up on the latest news from around the Web, but for website owners, it’s yet another way to get that content out to the public.
If you’re new to Currents, it’s essentially an RSS reader that grabs the most recent articles and blog posts from your site and optimizes everything for display on smartphones and tablets — only your readers don’t have to figure out your feed URL.
When the owner of a website or blog sets up an account and publishes their content on Google Currents Producer, all the user has to do is search for that specific site and it will stay bookmarked on their device, fetching the latest stories on launch.
Sound like something you might be interested in?
Get Your Site On Currents
First things first, you’ll want to log into your Google account and head over to Google Currents Producer.
The first thing you’ll see is a terms of service agreement, asking for your basic information like name, email, etc. – fill that out and you’ll be brought to this screen:
I think Latest News or something along the lines of that is a good edition name, but feel free to name it whatever you want – it’s just the subtitle that will display to the right of your page.
If you have a YouTube account connected to your blog you might want to add that as well, but if not, just clickCreate and you should be up and running with a very basic page.
Customizing Your Header
By now, you should have noticed the bland and boring text-based header image on your page. It can be changed fairly easily, but you’re going to have to upload both a background image and your actual logo directly to your Media Library before you can edit the CSS to display your custom graphics:
For the background, the image should be no taller than 60px – make sure it’s something that you can tile horizontally as well.
Your logo should be smaller than 60x400px, I recommend keeping the height around 35 or 40px, just so there’s a little bit of padding above and below.
After you’ve uploaded your images, it’s time to head over to your Sections and select Section header template:
From the Section header template dropdown, select Custom.
Now then – here comes the hard part: editing your CSS file to display your header.
Fortunately, with the following code you’ll only have to replace the links to your images:
Using that code along with our custom images, our Currents page now looks a little more attractive:
