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.

 

How Do You Customize My Documents?

Comments off · July 18, 2008 at 6:01 am · Desktop, Personal

I’ve been out searching for a program that will allow me to quickly color code the folders on my Vista machine.  The only problem is, I can find a lot of good programs that work with Windows XP but this must be a harder task to accomplish on Vista.

Here are a few of the Windows XP programs I have tried (all good solutions by the way) that just haven’t gotten the job done thus far.

• Folderico
• Xentient Labels
• iColorFolder

So I am asking you, do you know of a good Vista folder customizer out there?   I need something that would allow me to quickly change the colors to kind of help organize things a ‘bit in my PC.   Better yet, how do you organize your “My Document” folders?

 

Make iGoogle Work for You

Comments (2) · May 18, 2007 at 7:30 am · Hot Web Topics, Online Tools

I don’t like to have to scroll when looking at my start page. If I make a really long one and have to keep going down and down to view it - chances are I’m not. This is a page I look quickly at when I want to go somewhere else. It should be small - yet easy to quickly navigate through.

Get the Basic Gadgets Out of the Way First

Your first tab should have all of the gadgets on it that you actually get some use out of. I like the weather one along with the Google Reader one the most. You might also put other application based gadgets here so that you can get good use out of them.

Here are a few good “basic” gadgets to get you started:

• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Weather Forecast
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Easy Way to Gather Gadgets Based on Topic

Now every tab after that should be based around things the interest you. You can create them very simply by naming the new tab after your interest. For me I would type in “Web Hosting” and then make sure the check mark for “I’m feeling lucky. Automatically add stuff based on the tab name” is selected.

From the suggestions they give you - you can cut out the ones you really don’t like and add a few it might have forgotten.

Should You Create a Popular Tab?

Now there are a lot of social link popularity Web sites out there as well. Digg, Reddit, Delicious and a boat load of others. You might try to gather all the ones you can and put them on their own tab. This way you can see what is the most popular set of links at any given moment.

Need suggestions on which ones you should be tracking? Visit popurls for a long list of these sort of Web sites. Visit each one, grab the RSS link and take it to you own iGoogle start page.

Is That It? Do You Have More to Share?

There you have it. That might have taken a whole five minutes to configure! Now you have a need focused start page that will help you keep up to date with what you need to stay informed with. If you know of any other iGoogle optimization tips feel free to drop in a comment and let me know.