Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?

Social media as a class is pretty old, even if some of the current popular players are young. What was happening with Tom from MySpace or your ex from high school was some of the only information that wasn’t available on a portal.

I don’t think the rise of one directly led to the fall of the other. The way we consume information changes over time. And as we all collectively got better at information retrieval, portals were less important. The internet also move from “one” of the places you checked for content (so efficient checking with a portal) to the primary source for news and content for many people. Now browsing the web is just as much a part of the process, especially now that we had a decade or so of practice.

And to be clear — no content creation company liked portals or aggregators. No one wanted iGoogle in between you and their own advertising. As many hits as a good HN or Digg post could get you, if you were the NYT or a news company, you would rather people start at your homepage as opposed to direct linking in. And these media companies have gotten much more sophisticated. Licensed AP news feeds were everywhere on portals. Now, a newspaper would rather keep you in their site with a subscription. Different times, different business models.

You are definitely right though — AltaVista’s front page was significantly more cluttered than the default Google page. And that was an advantage for Google. Not only did the Google page load faster, but it was less distracting. CNBC at the time couldn’t figure out how Google was going to make much money with only in-results ads. Hindsight.

I dont even remember when was the last time I visited Google.com Homepage to search something. It all goes through the browser. Hence why Google, despite promising to both Mozilla and Steve Jobs not building a browser, actually went ahead and build Chrome. They dont want their Search entry point to be hold by their competitor. And Apple are now extorting $10B per year just on default search engine placement.

There are Python scripts that fill the content of the page and generate the markup for me. Those Python scripts go out and grab the price of various crypto currencies in my portfolio, several comic strips, the front page of hackernews, some cute cat pictures from reddit, my bank balance, the subjects in my email inbox, discord messages for work, the messages from my linkedin account, weather for the next three days, upcoming bills to pay, and a few other bits and pieces, along with several links to sites I regularly visit.

I thought about a Google search box but then I use Alfred/Albert/Wox, or can simply hit CTRL+L when the browser is open.

I have set up and taken off many ideas over the years, e.g. a link to open up OneNote and create a new entry, but then I just press WIN/CMD/SUP+N, or links to websites I only occasionally visit. What I have generally avoided is just having links to sites, e.g. github, LinkedIn, without those links being something that provided useful information.

Everything is stored in plain text files. I have a few .ini files that need a little more structure.

Some scripts run every few minutes (update email inbox), but most scripts run every 12 hours (crypto currency prices, comic strips, etc). My homepage Python scripts sit on my main server, and have been plodding along quietly for over 25 years, with occasional updates as I've added new features, e.g. linkedin, or changed email providers.

With separate, external scripts that output blocks of HTML, if one of the scripts breaks for whatever reason, e.g. a webiste updated or the API keys expired, nothing breaks on my homepage. It just keeps trucking. If a script breaks, it simply generates an empty HTML block.

There is nothing interactive or dynamic on the page, which means it is viewable and usable and on almost every device out there.