Comments on: Home, home on the page

Home, home on the page

blahblahblah — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 19:16:58 -0800

Start the new year with a new start page: a hundred or so internet start pages, most including nifty Ajax or flash features, and many with third-party modules. Netvibes and its ecosystem of developers is a favorite among many reviewers, but the new MS Live and its gadgets are also getting good press, at least among Windows users. Of course, there are are always the standards. Alternately, you can select a homepage for kids that will make your eyes bleed; a site that lets you share your own portals; a homepage that creates itself; or download the amazing Orb 2.0 to create a personalized portal that lets you stream any media or files on your PC to any other device connected to the internet. What is your homepage? [Warnings: Not all pages work on all browsers. Not having MeFi as your homepage may be viewed as a sign of disloyalty, but not having the RSS feed on your page certainly will.]

By: phaedon

phaedon — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 19:26:16 -0800

netvibes is awesome. orb is pc only. wank.

By: booksherpa

booksherpa — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 19:36:35 -0800

I'll second Netvibes. I 'm a fan of all things Google, and used to use the Google personalized homepage, but I switched when I found Netvibes. I looked at Google again a few days ago, and it's still not nearly as good as Netvibes. It can even, oh, let's give a purely hypothetical example, show the feeds of 32 knitting blogs on one page. Not that I would know anything about that.

By: specialk420

specialk420 — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 19:38:08 -0800

netvibes has lost my profile :(

By: Terminal Verbosity

Terminal Verbosity — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 19:41:42 -0800

Refdesk has been my homepage for years now. It's not slick or ajaxy; no rss, just an AP feed and a crapload of links. Some of these seem like viable replacements, but switching now would seem like cheating.

By: jouke

jouke — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 20:44:03 -0800

Haha, netvibes shows a lot of pictures of tulips and windmills when you visit it from the Netherlands. But still, I didn't know that site, nice.

By: djgh

djgh — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:17:41 -0800

I actually don't really see the point. I tried Netvibes a while back, and there's not enough content in each block - it's just skimming off a little bit of what makes each site good, without giving the full range. My start page would just be a list of links to various sites, but who needs that when there are bookmarks? So my homepage is about:blank.

By: wah

wah — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:27:48 -0800

Nice link, that netvibes is pretty slick.

By: jonson

jonson — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:33:42 -0800

djgh - use Netvibes (or any other rss reader) to keep track of less frequently updated pages - like online cartoons that don't update frequently, or customized craigslist searches or bittorrent lookups so you can see when that album finally leaks, etc.

By: George_Spiggott

George_Spiggott — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 22:10:21 -0800

about:blank rules.

By: booksherpa

booksherpa — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 22:11:54 -0800

djgh, did you try editing the block for each feed to change the number of items you can see? I think the max is determined by the feed provider, and not Netvibes. My Lifehacker feed is 40 items long.

By: blasdelf

blasdelf — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 22:27:27 -0800

It's all about:blank

By: Rictic

Rictic — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 23:47:25 -0800

Thirding the blankess. A warning though, the personalweb.com software that automatically creates a homepage for you (FPP link text: 'creates itself') is made by Claria Corporation, but you might better recognize them as Gator Corporation, one of the most notoriously awful adware companies. I'd no more use software from them than use condoms from the Catholic church. Their incentives do not align with yours.

By: chrissyboy

chrissyboy — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 03:51:01 -0800

man, there's something fishy about that favoor site on his list. No demo so (like a fool) I signed up to check it out and none of it works? I'm sticking with the google.

By: rmm

rmm — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 06:47:12 -0800

not quite as cool as about:blank is the ol' favourite The Hunger Site...

By: jonson

jonson — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:32:45 -0800

does anyone who uses NetVibes have a custom stock ticker on their page? I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

By: blahblahblah

blahblahblah — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:39:35 -0800

As an addendum - I didn't touch on mobile homepages in the FPP. Has anyone found anything better than Google for cell phone/PDA homepages?

By: djgh

djgh — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 20:49:41 -0800

jonson - I use Bloglines for my cartoon (and blog) fix, but that BitTorrent idea is a good one. I think for me though the reason for using about:blank is so that I don't go "Oh, shiny thing" and waste half an hour. blahblahblah - When I had to use my Palm T|X as my primary means of accessing the web for six months, I decided to knock up a page beforehand. Wasn't particularly special, just a list of links, but it loaded quickly, and I made sure it would only deliver to a Palm browser (so odds of it being seen by the outside world were low). Obviously, authentication etc. would be better, but it wasn't critical for me that it be uber-private.

By: deusdiabolus

deusdiabolus — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:24:09 -0800

Even though I have a Netvibes account (because I'm an internet whore), I really like Pageflakes because it allows you to do one thing that Netvibes doesn't. You can make your page public and share it with others, which is a great way of collecting all your aggregated content into one place. But in all honesty, all the browsers on my computer are set to "about:blank". It's just easier, especially if you're having plugin issues or you just launched a link.

By: Zinger

Zinger — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:26:25 -0800

I don't really see the point of these either, apart from the cynical view which is that providers of these services aggregate data to sell to demographers and marketers. Then again, I've never seen the appeal of Refdesk either. It always just makes my eyes water. I'll stick to my "Daily" folder in the bookmarks sidebar for now.

By: Duug

Duug — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 02:05:58 -0800

Blah, try Tigdoo or my personal favourite WAMPAD