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personal favourites start page
Steven Avery:
Hi Folks,
The goal: A nice, simple categorized Start Page to act as my portal to best sites, daily special, important chores, my main bookmarks. A Start Page that acts like a bit of a reminder system, and lets me open up say .. DonationCoder, FreewareGenius, Wilders, BitsDuJour, and GiveawayoftheDay in one small categorized group. (Even if it is five clicks). Or make a small category for my software support forums. Or this, and that, and the other.
Much as I like using Linkman for bookmarks and PIM, and it is the repository for tens of thousands of links, a personal start page with categories of bookmarks would be very nice. (Linkman has Fastlinks and Daily links features, it would be great if they expanded their functionality to a categorized start page !) So I checked to see what software or web services are available, either on a host or a program that puts the page on your on puter.
There are tons of social bookmarking and portal sites that do stuff like this, yet they tend to do it in a clumsy, bulky manner. However maybe one of them can do the job nicely, if you think this can be accomplished with a site like Symbaloo, Netvouz, NetVibes, iGoogle, My Yahoo, myAOL, Diigo/Furl, Flyapp, Eskobo, linkagogo, Homepage Startup, Pageflakes, Only2Clicks, StartAid, Tizmos, Zimbio, Webwag, Widgetop, Backflip, 3x3Links, or another .. or one of the Firefox extensions like Speed Dial or FastDial or Auto Dial or XMarks .. please share away ! (There should be more than the 9 links on the front page that you will get by those looking like the Opera implementation.) Some like Symbaloo or Netvouz may have a clean, neat, easy-to-make category-oriented skin, however I haven't seen it yet in a quick net-browse.
If you simply want to group the "big 50" or 100 or so bookmarks (the ones you glance at daily or frequently) .. and then occasionally make some additions or add or a new category .. they are of little help, at least what I have seen so far. Oh, importing is not the issue for me, I only want the frequently used bookmarks set up in a special order. An hour or two setup is expected, but should be quick and relatively painless.
And clearly you could build your own page, that might be the ultimate solution.
NICETIES
However you would like to use a service that built in a lot of niceties. e.g. If your page could have sub-pages (at least one level would be very helpful) if sections could be moved from page to page, if there could be a read-only method for visitors that you could send a link to, if the note function is good, stuff like that, it would help.
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Linkshelf http://www.linkshelf.com/ was mentioned on DonationCoder in 2006, and its entry methods are decent.
My Linkshelf
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=2015.0
This site lets you make fairly quickly a clean categorized list, however it lacks a lot of niceties and nothing is happening with it for years, as far as I can tell. Oh, you could set up a second level with an alternate sign-on, a bit of a workaround.
And, when I tried to figger out where it came from and what it was doing, one site mentions how it comes from a pedigree of a developer who did similar stuff in the porn world. Making privacy polices problematic (this is hosted by linkshelf) and being a real strain and pain in general to my way of thinking, even if there is no functional connection.
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Favoor has similar functions:
Favoor
http://www.favoor.com/
However it also has not gone anywhere for years, is less helpful than Linkshelf in some ways, looks as dull as possible and is close to being a nothing. It does add a sticky note function not in Linkshelf, one of the few features that would be nice to have integrated but can be done in NoteZilla or Stickeis. I think I may have ended up with someone elses Favoor and when I went into a page to check who is the sign-on I got program warning messages with my "change my settings" on the page. This is going nowhere.
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Switching to programs that you install, local management, in these cases the resulting page is on your hard disk, although note the note about pop-ups that were in Tidy Favorites.
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Tidy Favorites is more active, with GAOTD and Bits, with Free and Pro (paid) versions.
Tidy Favorites (Nov 2008)
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=15714.0
Tidy Favorites Is a Customizable Thumbnail Homepage
http://lifehacker.com/5092265/tidy-favorites-is-a-customizable-thumbnail-homepage
Giveaway of the Day - Tidy Favorites Pro - April 27, 2009
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/tidy-favorites-pro/
I haven't installed it to look at the skins, to see if there is something really tidy and neat available with categories. If someone has a picture of this working in a real tidy fashion (looking a bit like Linkshelf in simplicity) then I would likely give it a buzz. However it seems to be more of an alternate bookmark manager (which I do not need) than a clean home page maker. And apparently they are hoping to have subscribers paying $20/yr. (Not a deal-breaker if the program is fantabulous.)
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The Favorite Start Page - Gudbrand Eggen
While this goes back to 2003, compatibility updates are common, including Firefox 3 in 2008.
File Forum (with pic)
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/The-Favorite-Start-Page/1111448201/1
So far this is my leader, ready to go. Far from super-elegant, yet functional. Being on the disk will help speed.
====================
Your suggestions ?
Shalom,
Steven Avery
MilesAhead:
Hmmm, I don't think I can help with this one. I always use about:blank ;)
cyberdiva:
And clearly you could build your own page, that might be the ultimate solution.
-Steven Avery (June 15, 2009, 07:01 AM)
--- End quote ---
Yes, this is what I did a number of years ago. I made a very simple page in HTML and set it to be the page my browsers open on. It has two advantages: I have a ready listing of the sites I want to go to most often, and I am not dependent on a specific Internet site's being up for my homepage to load. Since the page is located on my hard drive, it loads reliably and instantly. Of course, I can easily update the page when I want to add, change, or delete an entry.
40hz:
I made a very simple page in HTML and set it to be the page my browsers open on.
-cyberdiva (June 15, 2009, 08:28 AM)
--- End quote ---
+1 with cyberdiva on that one.
For a while, there were a number of personal homepage generator apps out there. But most of them seem to have gone the way of the Dodo, along with all those neat standalone bookmark managers.
I had tried several page generators. But in the end, I too wound up coding my own simple homepage. That was the only way I could get it exactly the way I wanted it. I just exported my bookmarks to an html file, stripped out everything except the links in my daily/favorites folder, and then started customizing from there.
That solution worked great for me right up until I discovered the Sage extension and started doing most of my daily browsing via RSS feeds. I also keep a special favorites folder up on Firefox's bookmark toolbar for all those other sites I regularly visit. That combination works so well for me that, like MilesAhead, I now just use a blank homepage.
:)
MilesAhead:
I haven't tried the rss feed thingy myself. But then again, I got bored with being a news junky a few years back. It was fun for awhile to read all kinds of newspaper's English editions around the world. After a time it was same crap different day though. :)
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