I have spent a lot of time researching this and filing paperwork, and I still have a long way to go. I am in the process of programming a website to be able to resell online. eBay won’t cut it for what I have planned. It will take me awhile to get everything working the way I want.

In the meantime I am willing to sell to anyone and everyone. I am not marking up my prices very much right now — I’m essentially selling at my cost which isn’t as good as you might think — but I’m sure my pricing structure will change once I launch my website. Unfortunately, since Gridiron Solutions an official business I need to collect sales tax from sales in Nebraska, whereas I don’t have to collect tax from sales made to customers outside of the state.

I have the potential to save you a lot of money over local retail stores on many items. I can also be competitive with many online businesses. As I place orders with my vendors I have minimum order amounts I have to meet in order to avoid small order charges as well as incentives to get free shipping. Going forward, as my customers help me meet those amounts I will be able to pass the savings on.

Gridiron Solutions will not be making much money right now; probably a handful of dollars here and there. I will be covering my costs and passing the rest of the savings on to my customers. I hope to build trust and relationships with my customers. As Gridiron Solutions’ revenue increases I hope its profits will start to increase too.

I know the U.S. economy is terrible right now and it’s probably supposed to be a bad time to start a business. I don’t care. I’m ready for the challenge. I’m going to work hard and attempt to be fiscally sound. I won’t get myself into financial trouble so the worst the economy can do is slow my company’s growth.

When I am finally able to launch Gridiron Solutions’ ecommerce website it will be much easier to quote pricing. For now I’ll just have to do a lot of manual work gathering my costs and setting my prices. If you would like me to quote you a price on something that runs on electricity — or even toasters, pots and pans, and cutlery –please send me an email or call me at (402) 770-3186. I look forward to seeing this company get off the ground.

This leaves the processor or hard drive(s) as the likely problem. I chose an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Dual-Core processor because I was trying to keep costs down and my previous living room PC’s had 2 GHz or slower Intel Celeron CPU’s and ran just fine. I have two hard drives: one 200 GB SATA drive as my system drive and another 250 GB IDE drive for my downloads and videos. I’m going to do some monitoring to see if I can’t narrow down this problem.

My TV tuner card came with a remote control and so far I’m impressed with it. It seems to have enough buttons to do everything I need to do without being too complex. The system responds to the remote control quickly too which is always important.

I also uploaded Simple Giants one day after Simple Patriots but Google has yet to add it to their directory. Google really needs to get going with their theme directory. The URL for the Simple Giants XML is www.gridironsolutions.com/igoogle/themes/SimpleGiants/SimpleGiants.xml.

As it stands right now there are only a handful of user submitted themes so my theme is getting a decent amount of traffic. Time permitting I may add Patriots *gag*, Giants, and Chargers themes.

Being the perfectionist that I am, I wanted my iGoogle page to look a certain way and became frustrated that, due to the lack of themes available, I was unable to achieve that look. So I attempted to google up a theme that would satisfy me.

To my surprise there was only one Google Gadget that attempted to solve my quandary. This gadget was created by BonstioNet and while it was a great idea and initially appeared to solve my problem, it had a few problems. First, it is an inline gadget – a type of gadget that has access to the entire DOM of iGoogle. These type of gadgets show a security alert to users and they have since been deprecated by Google. Second, since it is a gadget, it doesn’t actually theme or skin the page until it is fully loaded. The reality of my experience with this gadget was that I would initially see the iGoogle page with its default theme, followed shortly thereafter with my own selected skin. This annoyance turned out to be the deal breaker for me.

At that point I decided I would see what I could do to create my own theme that didn’t have any of the aforementioned problems. After my initial research I quickly realized that BonstioNet had created the best possible solution utilizing the tools that Google had provided. Since I was unable to improve on what they had done I looked at simply using my local proxy server (Proxomitron) to replace iGoogle’s CSS file with my own. This solution worked perfectly and the results were exactly what I wanted – with one exception. This solution does not follow me everywhere, regardless of which computer I’m using.

So, as you can see, I was unable to solve my problem perfectly, and that didn’t sit well with me. During my research I picked up on a few things that led me to believe Google was deprecating inline gadgets partly because they were going to provide their own API for theming. I hadn’t actually read that anywhere, but I couldn’t believe Google would take away skinning from people and not replace it with their own solution.

On Wednesday, January 16, 2007, Google officially announced the iGoogle Themes API. With this API developers can finally create themes in a Google supported way. Basically a developer needs to create an XML file following the template provided by Google.

I created my first theme called SimplePackers and it turned out to be an incredibly simple task. You just need to specify a centered header image and tiled background along. Doing that along with specifying a few font color attributes yields an incredibly different looking iGoogle page.

The iGoogle Themes API appears to be an early release as evidenced by the testing mode not working as well as the lack of several attributes like background colors and fonts. Luckily there was a workaround for the testing mode problem and I expect Google will shortly updated the API to include several more customizable attributes.

Google has finally provided a tool for developers to customize the look of iGoogle. Like all API’s, this one is sure to grow and improve over time. I encourage everyone to take a look at the XML template and see how easy it is to create your own theme. Perhaps one day Google will have a large directory of user-created themes. If they don’t then I’m sure some enterprising person will create their own. Until then, if you like the Green Bay Packers or are simply looking for an alternative to Google’s provided themes, then give SimplePackers a try.