How to customise your home page
From the very earliest days of the web, browsers had something called a ‘home page’. This was the default web page that would come up when you’d launch your browser and connect to the Net.
Most people never change their home pages; they use whatever they were given. This could be the home page of their employer, or their Internet Service Provider, or even the home page of the browser itself.
Yet the idea of a home page remains a potent one. You can easily create a customised home page with various small boxes. One might be today’s weather for your locality. Another might includes top news stories from the BBC or CNN. You could even have a box with your most frequently called phone numbers, a short to-do list, a large clock, and a calculator.
To create such a customised home page, one which includes the things Iyou want to see when you look at your computer in the morning, you can use a tool like Netvibes.
Netvibes had five million users by last summer and is still growing. It was hailed last week by “The Economist “as being one of the very few examples of a major new web innovation coming from France.
And it’s not alone — competitors for individually-crafted personal home pages include Google’s homepage, Microsoft’s Windows Live, PageFlakes, Webwag and the very attractive Yourminis.
Customised home pages are not new. Back in the 1990s, search engines like Yahoo pioneered personalised home pages. But new technologies known collectively as Web 2.0 have made it easier than ever before to create a home page that really does give you – in an instant – the information you need to start your day on the web.
Many thanks to Eric Lee for the information in this posting.