What’s Your Homepage(s)
For a long time — so long I can’t remember when I started — My Yahoo! has been my homepage. Back when Yahoo! was king they were the (possibly) the first to do a customizable portal page. Since I started using it the content I have on the page hasn’t really changed.
When I first started using Firefox I set it up to have multiple homepages. Did you know you can do that? In the Homepage field in the preferences, you can separate multiple addresses with a pipe (located on the SHIFT variation of the backward slash [\] key, which will produce this “|” ) and when you launch Firefox the next time it will open all of your pages in separate tabs. Great little feature. I eventually found I wasn’t using those other pages, and gradually removed them from my setup.
Back to my initial train of thought. In the left column of My Yahoo! I have stock stuff (including my portfolio) and a ski report for some resorts of my choosing. In the right column I have my sports scores and weather. Center (main) column has top news stories, business news, sports news, tech news, entertainment news, and the obligatory “Reuters Oddly Enough.”
I was talking with a coworker about homepages recently, and how I just can’t get used to the personalized Google homepage. I claimed that the Google page was just too cluttered. His comment was that my My Yahoo! screen was more cluttered than my personalized Google page. I’ve basically become accustomed to the layout of the Yahoo! screen.
What do you have as your homepage? Do you have multiple homepages? Do you have a suggestion for me to try out besides Google and Yahoo!?
Feb 18th 2007
I’ve used HotSheet for years. It’s customizable, and has lots of links of interest already there. They also update several times a year.
Feb 19th 2007
For quite some time, I used Netvibes and loved it, then switched to the Google Personalized Homepage. Now, I’m afraid, I really don’t have a “personal portal”.
I mostly used the aforementioned pages for tracking RSS feeds. I’d futz around with the occasional Sudoku widget or maybe a local weather deal, but it was mostly about reading my feeds. Once Google Reader redid their UI, I was hooked.
Now, my homepage is Blingo (the Publishers Clearing House frontend for Google where you can win stuff), but I rarely visit it directly. Instead of having a one-stop page with all of my stuff, I mostly just keep 8 or so tabs open in firefox all the time (mail, reader, meebo, feedburner, del.icio.us, flickr, and my snazzy GTD blog linked above).
I guess I’ve just never looked back since abandoning the idea of a single start page. Though, if I ever switch to a digital-based GTD system (and stikkit might just do the trick, to be honest), it’d probably be there.
Love the new blog, keep it up!