More Things - Nbr 28 Customized Home Page

Familiarity brings me back to My Yahoo! homepage. Even though my wife and I each have a Dell laptop PC, and share an older, slower Dell desktop, now used more as a server, we will use whatever Windows account is up and running on each others pc's. She wants to see My Yahoo! Her business depends on it.

Long ago I customized MY Yahoo! with services and feeds we want to see first thing everyday. I do change the news service feeds. Not long ago, Time magazine let their Quotes of the Day languish with no updates for weeks. I replaced with an NPR News feed. I had had NYTimes and BBC News rss feeds on the Firefox toolbar, but now I use Google Reader instead.

Nobody does customizable Financial portfolio screens better than Yahoo! That and Yahoo Mail as our shared personal email account are reasons to keep MY Yahoo! at the front.

Firefox browser makes all the difference in the world. The way I customize toolbars, and maintain bookmarks make good companions with a customizable home page.

I commented in another post about iGoogle being sluggish. It depends on what gadgets you put in there. Dynamic feeds slow it down. I keep it up on my Dell desktop.

As before, iGoogle is most useful when you have many Google related applications, as many of us do. Again, I can get at gmail and Facebook as fast from my toolbar as having them open a new window(tab). More about Google and gadgets in Thing 29.

I found the reviews of NetVibes and PageFlakes useful. In a way they are for a niche audience. Most interesting was the review by Cnet, which I haven't read for years. Strange that it's content was not complete; even though it's headline said Live.com, there was nothing about it in the article. And, I'm more and more impressed with Mashable.

The School Library Journal article on textbooks 2.0 style has application to what I would like to do as a volunteer for the Masterpiece Arts Program in Silver Bay. I want to do a session in the library computer lab, where I control what the students will see; explore the world of art related web resources. The PageFlakes layout looks good.