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Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

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Re: Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

#131

Post by easrng »

jlukic wrote: post #65

I also run a customizable start page http://myfav.es its cost $100/month for 10 years to run but i keep it up because a lot of schools use it to help set up their shared computers and i couldn’t ever have the heart to shut it down. Once you set it up you can also run it entirely offline using app manifests from myfav.es/fast if you don’t like the idea of your new tab experience being slowed down by web requests.

Do browsers even support app manifests anymore? I thought they'd abandoned them in favor of service workers.

Re: Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

#132

Post by kixiQu »

> “Make your own home page” is an old appeal. It is older than the mid 90’s. Not even 1994, but 1992. On the internet, one year is equal to ten astronomical years, there is a century between 1992 and 1994.

> So in 1992, the home page was a document that you saw when you opened your browser – which at that time was WWW on the NEXT computer.

> As the author of “The Whole Internet” noticed in 1992: “The home page provided by CERN is a good entry point into the web; it points you to a lot of resources fairly quickly. However, there are lots of reasons to want your own home page.”

> He meant that maybe the links provided by CERN are far from your interests and you’d prefer, for example, links to medicine rather than physics resources when you open your browser. So you could edit the CERN page, filling it with your links and notes and it would be your home page.

> So 50 years later :), in 1993, with the arrival of the Mosaic browser, the web left academia. Web users got ideas and tools to extend home pages, and turn them into websites. The term “home page” started to change its meaning. It became the first page of a website. Then as a sort of metonymy, it started to mean personal web pages. Making a home page soon meant not making the first document of your website, but making your personal website, your home page, YOUR HOME ON THE WEB.

Olia Lialina, net artist who does a lot of internet history stuff: https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/5118

Wrote about homepages recently. https://maya.land/monologues/2022/09/19/homepages.html I hope people have fun with this tool! Even without getting your hands dirty yourself with some HTML, it encourages an attitude of "I ought to be able to make this be how I want" towards technology

Re: Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

#133

Post by wruza »

fazfq wrote: post #84

The last thing I need is such a stream of information in my new tab page. I would never get anything done. Thank the Lord for about:blank

About blank is too white for me, so I simply removed everything from a speeddial except background. Bookmarks bar folders are my friends. Docs, prod.sites, dev.links, localhost:8000, services, music - all is right there. It also saves one click compared to speeddial.

Would be nice if it could be configured to live on a sidebar, and a checkbox for each bookmark to always open in a new tab. But you can’t get everything you want, I guess.

Re: Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

#134

Post by wazoox »

joshmanders wrote: post #126
perth wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that’s reasonable. I’m confused at the kind of customers you guys had though. Even my parents (tech illiterate baby boomers) know enough basic PC knowledge to try to type “www.google.com” into the address bar to determine if they have internet.

Can't speak for those customers, but I know people today, younger than 35 who think whatever is set to the homepage IS the internet. Some had Google as their homepage. Some Facebook. I learned this when they would be like "Josh, the internet is down, can you help me?" and I'm like wahhhhh? Come to find out Facebook had an outage. "I just opened the internet and its not working". :facepalm:

People can't use computers: http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...

Re: Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

#135

Post by drewzero1 »

joshmanders wrote: post #126
perth wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that’s reasonable. I’m confused at the kind of customers you guys had though. Even my parents (tech illiterate baby boomers) know enough basic PC knowledge to try to type “www.google.com” into the address bar to determine if they have internet.

Can't speak for those customers, but I know people today, younger than 35 who think whatever is set to the homepage IS the internet. Some had Google as their homepage. Some Facebook. I learned this when they would be like "Josh, the internet is down, can you help me?" and I'm like wahhhhh? Come to find out Facebook had an outage. "I just opened the internet and its not working". :facepalm:

I get calls for this at least once a week. "Computer is slow/down" or "internet not working" when really the corporate partner's homepage is having issues. (Usually when everybody is sending in their orders for the week.)

Re: Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

#136

Post by tbran »

fazfq wrote: post #84

The last thing I need is such a stream of information in my new tab page. I would never get anything done. Thank the Lord for about:blank

What a disappointment that the top comment is a dig on someone else's work.

Perhaps next time you could try, "looks amazing, not for me".

Re: Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

#137

Post by sfchris »

bonyt wrote: post #99

Anyone remember using "MyYahoo!" where you could customize the page, putting feeds and other things in the boxes and arranging them as you saw fit?

I used that from 1996 until the 2010s when some of my favorite RSS feeds refused to load there. I had it in "compact mode" and it was super dense (no images, not much white space) so I could fit 5-10 stories from each feed, plus stock prices.

If anyone here used my yahoo extensively, what is the best replacement now?

Re: Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

#138

Post by vidarh »

perth wrote: post #123
RedShift1 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only did it on new pc's that had never been in customer's hands, not existing accounts. If computers came in for repair I didn't touch the settings.

Yeah that’s reasonable. I’m confused at the kind of customers you guys had though. Even my parents (tech illiterate baby boomers) know enough basic PC knowledge to try to type “www.google.com” into the address bar to determine if they have internet.

When I worked at Yahoo! (2003-2005), Yahoo! Search would bring up a second search box under the primary search box in the results if people searched for Google, as a not insignificant number of people would start their browser, have Yahoo as their homepage, yet enter "Google" in the search box when they wanted to search for something.

Supposedly the second search box in the results fooled a substantial proportion of those people into entering their search term rather than clicking through to Google.

That is the level of tech illiterate users many people had to deal with back when IE 6 was a current browser.

Re: Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

#139

Post by throw10920 »

fazfq wrote: post #84

The last thing I need is such a stream of information in my new tab page. I would never get anything done. Thank the Lord for about:blank

I generally agree - a new tab should, for the most part, be distraction-free.

However, with some cleverness, you can add content to the new tab page that adds value - e.g. AnkiTab (https://github.com/corollari/ankiTab) to help you review your decks. Sure, it's a minor distraction, but it's time-bounded (unlike a news feed), and theoretically it's a net gain if your decks contain knowledge that's genuinely useful to you.

Re: Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

#140

Post by mosselman »

tmvst wrote: post #85
mosselman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks very nice! How is the data saved? Could I set something up where I can edit it both in the browser and my editor or something?

Thanks! Everything is saved in the extension's local storage. Nothing leaves the browser. You can export editor content from the settings (three dots in the bottom left corner). That creates a .md file with your notes that you can probably import to any editor.

Cool. Is there a way to reliably retrieve the path of the internal markdown file (I assume it is a markdown file within the extension as well) so that I can setup a cron job to export it or something?

Also a firefox add-on would be cool as well.

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