GTD Wannabe

Personalized Start (Portal) Pages

Remember the good old days, when if you wanted a personalized start page in your browser, you coded it from scratch? Well, at least I did. I don’t know how many hours I spent tweaking HTML in order to create a 5-6 column web page, with different coloured blocks, each one with a heading, and holding several links that I found invaluable. I’ve never found browsing bookmark folders to be that quick, and I wanted a start page that I could access from different computers, even when I wasn’t on one of my own computers.Anyway, some time ago, I discovered the Protopage, which is basically like a whiteboard, where you can put sticky notes. You could have just text in the notes, or a list of links, or even RSS feeds! In addition, they have a couple of widgets. And, you can have more than one page, which may or may not be open to the public. Plus, you can play with the colour schemes, and placement of your little sticky blocks. No more tweaking HTML by hand!

Since I’ve moved to Protopage, I’ve found another few sites that offer similar services. Here is my personalized start page roundup:

1. Protopage. By far my favourite, since it offers the most flexibility and content choice. You can have personalized news through RSS feeds, sticky notes, notes containing lists of links, weather, etc. Customize the colours, and placement of notes/panels that nobody else can touch. For example, you can place the panels so that they overlap each other. In addition, you can roll them up so you just see the headers, snap them to the docking panel, etc. Very cool.
2. Google personalized start page. Not only does it show you your gmail status, but it has other widgets, such as weather, quote of the day, movie listings for your postal code, etc. In fact, Google has just released some new ‘widgets’ for your customized start page. It’s not as flexible as Protopage, but sometimes you just want something quick.
3. PageFlakes. I thought this one has great promise, but it’s not quite as flexible as Protopage, i.e., items (called “flakes”) must be placed in columns and there’s not as much flexibility as what you can put, i.e., no block for just collecting notes. However, there is an API that you can access if you feel like hacking your own “flakes”. Here’s a review of PageFlakes by a Web 2.0 guru. (via Download Squad) Update [5 Mar 06]: As per the comment below, PageFlakes has corrected me – you can put notes. Actually, keep checking on the PageFlakes page – they keep updating the number of flakes that you can play with – it seems to have doubled since the last time I looked!
4. MyStickies. Not so much a true start page, but you could use it as such. The website describes it as “bookmarks on steroids”. This is a great bit of scripting goodness that lets you stick a sticky note on any web page! The sticky homepage then shows you where you have stuck stickies. And you can tag them (multiple tags); and it’s smart enough to track when you did such a thing, so you can see how fresh your sticky notes are. I think it’s a great idea, and am trying to make use of it more and more.
5. LinkedFeed. I found this one through a recent list of the most promising Web 2.0 applications. It was considered a runner up to PageFlakes, but I really like the look of it.