I used to use a "my Yahoo" page as a home page because I had used it for so long, I had it tailored to deliver the news from many different sources, movies, weather, etc. And I had slowly added bookmarks to that page (not just to my browser, but to that page so I could access it elsewhere.) However, I've long been disgusted with Yahoo's intent to take over the world, along with AOL, and I want to switch. This has been spurred on by Yahoo screwing up my password for the third time, a password which is automated and I've never changed / fooled with, effectively blocking me from my page.

I'd love to hear suggestions of good sources for the above types of things... or if you've found something clever / fun / interesting that makes your day when your browser opens, I'd love to know what it is.

Thanks!

-- Anonymous, May 25, 2001

Answers

I use my.yahoo, too. I also hate it.

I've tried to find a good weblog to use as my start page, but nobody updates consistently at the right time of day, damn it.

-- Anonymous, May 25, 2001

Right now I'm using the Washington Post front page. That way I'm sure to be able to at least glance at the headlines even if I don't have time during the day to really read the paper.

-- Anonymous, May 25, 2001

Yeah, I use cnn.com. Even if I just immediately go to a different site, I can read quick enough that I'm able to absorb the day's top headlines at a glance, thus keeping me reasonably up to date with what's going on in the world.

-- Anonymous, May 26, 2001

I found I really like excite as my homepage customized it to my preferences it is always there, can pick it up wherever I am.

-- Anonymous, May 26, 2001

Here's another one for excite. Headlines, reminders, customizable TV schedule, weather, search engine. I've been using it for years. When I signed up with RoadRunner, the tech guy who installed my ethernet card reset my homepage. He wasn't out of the driveway before I reset it!

-- Anonymous, May 26, 2001

Andy made a start page for us to share. It's search-engine-licious!

-- Anonymous, May 26, 2001

I keep my portal on my C drive for browsing from home, and a mirror on scribble.nu for browsing from school. It's quick to load, and I can put all of my most visited links in one place. I don't know anything about html and/or design (obviously), so my page is very simple, but if you aren't an html retard, it might be fun to design something snazzy, import news from different sources, that kind of thing.

-- Anonymous, May 27, 2001

Forgot to say, Andy's search page is really cool! Very thorough. (Sorry to write a new message just for this, wish I could just stick it in the last one... don't know what happened to my personal pronouns.)

-- Anonymous, May 27, 2001

I am doing what Andy did - making my own. Everything I tried took too long to load.

-- Anonymous, May 27, 2001

Thanks for the answers! I've tried excite and must say that it's much better than yahoo -- many more choices of ways to customize the page, plus other neat stuff.

Michael, I have the Washington Post bookmarked -- it's a regualr visit. I might try it as a home page if excite doesn't prove to have a thorough run-down of the day's events.

I wish I was thorough (read: not so lazy) enough to create my own, with my own links. That seems like a very clever thing to do!

Appreciate the suggestions.

-- Anonymous, May 29, 2001

I used to use Excite as my home page, but it was always crashing. 3- 4 times a week, when I went there it was a generic page saying "Your personal preferences are currently unavailable" blah blah blah.

Then they stopped supporting their groups, but didn't tell the group members for four months. That just pissed me off so badly that I changed to Yahoo and never went back.

I'm not thrilled with Yahoo either, but at least my content is there when I log in.

-- Anonymous, May 29, 2001

i like New Scientist a lot, even though i'm not a scientist-- http://www.newscientist.co.uk . Also Robot Wisdom, even if the all-single-spaced text gives me a headache. And the Christian Science Monitor site seems friendly and reasonably even-handed.

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2001

So, none of you who keep online journals or maintain your own homepages use your journal or site as your main page? In all honesty, I never thought about using another page. I just (stupidly) thought that my browser should open with my page. But I'll have to think about an Excite page or something.

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2001

I've always had my browser set to open my "bookmark.htm" file. I sort my bookmarks into folders by purpose and move the most used items to the top of the list. Bookmarks within each section are then further sorted alphabetically.

That's one of the main reasons I haven't moved to IE, the "favorites" system sucks dead bunnies through a straw when compared to the simplicity of Netscape's bookmark system. My only real complaint is that Netscape never included an expiration function to automatically cull out old bookmarks into a separate "dead zone" folder.

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2001

I'm with you, Nels. I've been using my journal's "other journals" page as my home page pretty much as long as I've had the thing. In tandem with the "other links" page, to which it's linked, it's got everything I want to catch up on at the start of the day.

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2001

Note that my start page isn't maintained manually. I have a Perl program that sucks up the pages and extracts the just for FORM and then I can manually tweak just the stuff I want, and then I have another Perl program that glomps everything back together into the page that you know and love at http://petdance.com/start/. xoxo,
Andy

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2001

Wow. Andy's magic start page. **repeated bows, with mouth gaping open**

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2001

I use the items I'm bidding on page on Ebay as my startup page at work. It's the only site I need to look at first thing in the morning.

At home I don't have any startup page. I'm usually starting Netscape to go look at something and I don't want to wait for it to load something else.

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2001

I used to use Excite. I liked some of their features, but like The Hag I found it too crashilicious and my prefs were always missing. It was also slow as hell, with too much advertising. I liked some of their calendar features though.

I switched to Yahoo because it was faster. I eventually want to get a good organizer program that I can sync up with an online organizer like Yahoo. I don't have a palm and I have a Mac so Outlook is out of the question.

I've found "Yahoo News" sucks, which is surprising because it's fed from Rueters. Still, it seems like the same five stories will be up all day, but if I go to the local newspapers website I'll see tons more news has been happening.

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2001

My home page is set to www.inu.org. So you can put me in the egotist camp. :)

In all seriousness, it's pointless for me to open with a portal or links page because I have different pages for different tasks. If I want to scope for mouth organ newsbits, I go to My Yahoo (which I have tuned to give me mostly sex news, heh) or to the Mouth Organ Nibelung ring. If I want to read journals or scope out bits for Utopia, I go to my own Nibelung ring. There are other places.

I thought about writing some "build and customize your own portal" code a few years back. Nibelung is what emerged. Not quite the same thing, but very handy nonetheless.

-- Anonymous, May 31, 2001

My homepage is a home made hand coded page with links to all the useful HTML-documents on my computer. As there are: several style books for a few different languages, a HTML course, a page with on-line sources for journalists, and a cd-rom of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that uses the browser as it's interface.

-- Anonymous, May 31, 2001

My home page is also a page I made myself and published locally, containing all the links I hit daily. It's easily updated and helps me spend far too long online everyday.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

I suppose I, too, am not very creative. Or perhaps I suffer from a large ego. I just use my own page SpasticReb.com as my default. It helps me remember to update my site.

-- Anonymous, June 10, 2001