My subscription to http://start.me has been worth every penny I pay for it.
Is there an alternative that you don't have to sign up and pay for?
https://www.netvibes.com/ maybe?
Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
71–80 of 124 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
#72Years ago I wrote one as a side project, which I hosted on a desktop computer.
Now I just use the default browser start page, and periodically tweak my bookmarks bar. I make sure to turn off news articles / links, because I often get distracted by them when I'm trying to work.
Re: Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
#73This sounds an awful lot like a portal that was so popular around 2000. That’s the way it used to be. You’d setup a personal portal on Yahoo or MSN or iGoogle or whomever provided your email. Then you’d load up whatever widgets you wanted and placed them in an organized grid. News and fresh content was populated by RSS and you’d have you own personal start page on the Internet.
The goal for any portal site was to convince you to spend more time on the portal (this is how we got {Yahoo,Google} news). The more time on the portal was more ad impressions they could sell. Social media didn’t like sharing content this way and so portals became significantly less popular.
I’d forgotten how much I’d missed those.
Re: Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
#74Empty new tab in Firefox works great. There are also blank new tab extensions if you use Chrome.
What is exactly works great about it?
It is useless. Also this is what I have to deal with instead of my homepage opened.
I cannot open my homepage from local file on a new tab and they do not fix it for years.
What should happen in their strange brains to understand that this is basic functionality and it is not working! If home page doesn't work the browser doesn't work.
Homepage from local file can be opened on a first tab. It is a bug if firefox can't do the same on a next tab. How difficult to comprehend this for firefox team?
Re: Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
#75I made my own[1] as a Chrome extension.
I had one[2] that I had also made with lots of nice widgets like you are suggesting, but I realized that I wasn't using 90% of them, and so I reverted to something simpler.
Re: Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
#76about:blank
Re: Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
#77It's called a "home page". You even say that yourself. It's why the browser has a "home" button ... To take you to your (personal) home page. And even before that button and [saved] bookmarks, you had to have some place that contained your personal bookmarks. It was the page you set your browser to load when you opened it. And you did absolutely make it yourself (it was the first webpage I ever made). The main/first…
I agree that a lot of browsers call it the "home page" or similar, but I don't think a lot of people call it that, so the term is ambiguous at best. How many people know that their browser has a Start Page (often customizable) and a Home Page (optional, pick a URL) in the first place?
Last time I had one, it was a big collection of work-related links, back when you could fit all the "important" documentation portals for a LAMP stack on one screen. :-)
Re: Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
#78Flat text.
I'd lean strongly toward something written using Markdown and converted to HTML, though depending on the specific configuration I wanted, straight raw HTML could very well end up being the format.
This is a case where content is vastly more significant than presentation or tools used, and simpler is better.
Some might also use tools such as Emacs org-mode, Joey Hess's Ikiwiki (https://ikiwiki.info/), VimWiki, or the like for a more structured set of pages rather than a single page.
Re: Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
#79Don't. Make a "Personal Start Worksheet" instead.
Explain?
Re: Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
#80At my job I made a "startpage" on our shared drive. Just an index.html that most of the company now uses. It contains links to all our internal tools en company sites. Layout is a simple css card grid. Its grouped per department so a specificatie link is easy to find.
Out of all the things I created I still get the most positive feedback on a single html file I mostly created for myself.