Regularly work with a lot of Excel spreadsheets? Make it easier to access them and brighten up your workspace by creating a start page. More »
A week after it was originally announced, Google rolls out a tool to “create iGoogle themes.” It can’t do everything we’d hope for, but check out what you can accomplish in the screenshots below.
43Marks is yet another customisable start page ala iGoogle or Netvibes which includes a prominent search box for Google or Yahoo, category buckets for favourite bookmarks, and boxes to display a handful of RSS feeds. What it doesn’t have is the variety of features and widgets iGoogle or My Yahoo offers, but it’s just as free with registration—and you don’t have to sign in to see your page once it’s set up. Of course, that means if someone knows your username, they can check out your homepage, too—so much for adding a “Porn” category. Thanks, SristiCaban!
43 MarksFirefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The Auto Dial Firefox extension automatically places shortcuts to your most frequently visited web sites inside all of your new, empty tabs. Mozilla Labs recently suggested that empty tabs could be put to better use by offering no-cost options for the user (i.e., if what you want isn’t what’s offered, it doesn’t hurt anything). Although not as inspired as the undeveloped concept at Mozilla Labs, Auto Dial fits perfectly with this idea. If you want more control over the content built in to new tabs, check out the previously mentioned Speed Dial extension. Auto Dial is free, works wherever Firefox does.
Auto Dial 4 [Firefox Add-ons via CyberNet]A post at the official Google blog by search VP Marissa Mayer discusses how one of the main criteria when designing its memorably minimal home page is keeping track of the number of words on the page. When Google recently decided to introduce a link to its privacy policy, company executives decided that another word would have to be removed to ensure the bare bones design aesthetic wasn’t disrupted: Larry and Sergey told me we could only add this to the homepage if we took a word away – keeping the “weight” of the homepage unchanged at 28. Given that the new Privacy link fit best with legal disclaimers on the page, I looked to the copyright line. There, we dropped the word “Google” (realizing it was implied, obviously) and added the new privacy link alongside it.
While this is an interesting design aesthetic, the page weight isn’t actually quite the same for Australian Google visitors, who score another six words thanks to the option of only searching Australian pages. If you don’t want that extra weight mid-screen, Google does offer a link to its regular US version.What comes next in this series? 13, 33, 53, 61, 37, 28… [The Official Google Blog]
Opera 9.5, the latest edition of the free (and pretty speedy) web browser, doesn’t make it readily apparent how to set its multi-page Speed Dial function as your start page. The How-To Geek points out that by setting your “Startup” to “Blank Page” in Tools->Preferences, and then heading to Advanced->Tabs->Additional tab options to un-check “Allow window with no tabs,” you’re good to go. This somewhat disables auto-starting with your last session’s tabs, but for Speed Dial fans, it’s a handy hack. While you’re tweaking Opera, try adding more sites to Speed Dial. Update: A watchful Mac/Opera user notes that the trick appears Windows only—any Mac users out there know which settings to tweak? Set the Speed Dial as the Opera Startup Page [The How-To Geek]
Whether you use it to keep up to date on the latest news or as a launching point for the rest of your browsing, you want to find a solid start page to fit your surfing habits. Earlier this week, we asked to share your favourite start page, and at over 350 comments later, we’re rounding up the five most popular answers. Hit the jump for an overview of each.
Want to mix up your browser-opening experience by rotating your home page? WhatPage.org, a free service with seemingly no ads or restrictions, lets you paste any site into a list that can hold more than 100, and provides a custom URL to set your home page to. Open your browser and hit home, and one of your pages opens. You control the numbered rotation of the pages, and can re-order at any time. As the site points out, it can also turn your home button into a favourite site click-browser. It’s a great free service, but let’s guess that our readers have their own solutions for rotating a home page—so let’s hear them in the comments. Thanks Mike! what page
Lifehacker reader and TiddlyWiki enthusiast Fraser has written up a guide that takes the idea of cut-and-paste Outlook Today customising to the next logical (or at least Lifehacker-friendly) conclusion—integrating a TiddlyWiki to-do list and notebook into Outlook. Combine the easy-to-edit power of a personal wiki with the at-a-glance inbox and task information from Outlook, and you’ve got a powerful start page indeed. For a primer on getting things done with a TiddlyWiki, check out guest-poster Jason Thomas’ GTDTiddlyWiki walkthrough. (Original Outlook Today post).
Your plain vanilla “Outlook Today” screen could be doing a whole lot more for you, especially if you aren’t afraid of a little HTML or can get handy with a free page creator. Even if hand-coding’s not your thing, the Tech-Recipes blog offers the big blocks of dense code that let you put your inbox, calendar, tasks, and whatever else anywhere you want on a page, leaving room for other stuff you might find useful. Feel free to mess around to your heart’s content, because it’s also un-doable with less than two clicks. Creating Your Own Outlook Today Page [Tech-Recipes.com]
