24 Personalized Start Pages

Comments · October 20, 2008 at 5:23 am · Online Tools

Since this is a Monday, figured it might be best to start your week off with the best ways to start of your day - a good start page in your browser.  As familiar as your morning cup of coffee - which of these is your favorite?

• PopURLs - Uniquely different than the rest, but still have a lot of information to share.
  
• My Live - The standard lots of boxes, fill me up type of start page.
  
• Protopage - One of the better of the customizable start pages, tons of options and tools.
  
• Pageflakes - Another top choice of mine.  Really like the look and feel of Pageflakes.
  
• Netvibes - Best of the lesser known selections.  Latest update was kinda disappointing however.
  
• Suprglu - Brings your favorite social tools together to create a better start page.
  
• 24eyes - At least they didn’t call it 99 bottles of beer on the wall?
  
• iGoogle - Google’s recently updated way to start your day.  Quickly becoming a fan favorite.
  
• favoor - Notes, news links and more on this lesser known start page.
  
• StartAid -StartAid is perfect for saving all your bookmarks online.
• eskobo - Funny enough, has nothing to do with Eskimos.  Who knew?
  
• smplr - One text box to rule them all!  It doesn’t get any more simplier. (or is that smplr?)
  
• feedly - Start page + Firefox = Starting Goodness?
  
• Widexplorer - Because nobody wanted to use the narrow explorer.
  
• Gizi - A clone of the more traditional tons of boxes start page.
  
• LinkedFeed - The more you use it, the better it serves you!
  
• Fav 2.0 - A thumbnail gallery of your favorite web sites.
  
• Widgetop - A fun and colorful desktop-like start page. 
  
• BBC Beta - Even the BBC is letting you customize their front page.
  
• Webwag - Looks like Netvibes’ ugly and less talented step sister.
  
• My AOL - Get your day going with a fresh cup of AOL!
  
• Sputtr - At least it wasn’t called stu.. stu… studder.
  
• Symbaloo - Wins my most unique award.  Tons of squares to fill in with your favorites.
  
• My Yahoo! - Get your news, weather, RSS feeds and more all with a Yahoo!-like twist.
  

Is it time to change the start page you have been using?  There are many of them out there to choose from.  Secret is, is to find the one that provides the most stuff you need in the best presentation possible.

 

Google Browser Sync Alternatives

Comments · May 2, 2007 at 8:00 am · Online Tools

For some unknown reason, Google Browser Sync decided to go wacky on me yesterday. Kept getting disconnected and 502 error codes. The browser sync had never done me wrong before - but I can’t afford not to be connected between my machines. So I set out for a long search to try to find an alternative and a replacement.

Meet the contenders…

Foxmarks - There is no tool out there that does everything GBS does, but the main thing I need is bookmark syncing. Foxmarks did do the work - only problem was it was confusing to setup. I wasn’t sure if I was uploading or downloading, syncing or unsyncing. I’m sure if I spent time with it - it might have made sense, but if I can’t figure it out in five minutes - I’m probably not going to use it.

Online Bookmark Manager - This is another Firefox extension solution with a free hosted space. I would say if folks like the idea behind Foxmarks but want a different route to go, OBM is worth a shot. Still didn’t do what I needed it to do though.

Bookmarks Synchronizer - This is a Firefox extension that let you connect to an FTP/WebDAV server and synchronize your bookmarks that are stored in an XML file. Nice, but still did not cut the cake for me. This is yet another solution like Foxmarks and OBM - but no free hosting for the backups.

If not these, who did you go with for bookmark syncing?

All of these were good solutions, but I decided to give the del.icio.us Bookmarks extension a shot. I moved all my PC bookmarks over to del.icio.us and I have to say I like it thus far.

All the “secret” bookmarks I have set to hide from the public - and it was easy enough to setup on both my desktop PC and my notebook computer. This extension totally replaces your standard bookmarking and replaces it with del.icio.us.

The whole thing is very fast as well - they much cache some of the results, because I can hardly even notice this is “integrated with the Web” at all.