Where do you begin?

Everyone has their own favorite start page (the page that appears when you open Internet Explorer or Firefox). Throughout my internet life, I’ve had many of them. I’ve changed my start page twice this week, and what is right for one person, is not necessarily for another. When I began here, my start page was set to the library website, but I usually was headed elsewhere. I also used my webmail account as a start page, but that’s not very private when there is someone over your shoulder. I decided to begin this blog with a post about a few of the neat places that I’ve found that offer good places to begin.

I’ve got some interesting and useful services to talk about when it comes to start pages, but I thought I would begin by pointing to how to change your start page in case anyone has missed out on this handy feature. Text Instructions for Internet Explorer, Video Instructions for Internet Explorer – Text Instructions Firefox (In Firefox, it is also possible to set it to open more than one tab, for instance the Biomedical Library website page with your gmail account behind it. Instructions here. Cool, huh?

Way back in the 90s when Yahoo was the coolest thing out there, I had a MyYahoo! start page. It updated the news and had different types of content that I chose all stored on the same page. It was one of the first “2.0″ products because you could customize the page just for you. I’m not if they used RSS (Really Simple Syndication) from the beginning, but today that’s how personalized homepages like MyYahoo, NetVibes, and iGoogle do it. I’ll probably spend a lot of time talking about RSS in the future, because it is one of the most exciting technologies I have witnessed, but for now if you haven’t heard about it, all you need to know is that it notifies you when a website adds new stuff and allows you to see it all in one place. (If you don’t know and you’re curious, watch this video). And you don’t have to know anything about RSS to use a personalized homepage. You just search for information streams in which you are interested and click “add.” (There is a way to make a more robust page by adding custom RSS feeds to iGoogle, and I linked to that for the experts.)

iGoogle

The great thing about having a personalized home page like iGoogle is being able to read all of your information in one place. Instead of checking my gmail, looking at my todo list, reading the online versions of the papers from my home town and Mobile, reading the New York Times, checking the Tide’s scores, looking at the library-related news to come across Google News, checking my Facebook page for friend requests, checking the weather, and then playing a quick game of Sudoku, I can do it all on one web page that I set up with iGoogle. Another great thing about it is that your Google Search box is waiting for you there at the top of the page. Libraries are using this tool to setup a start pages for their reference and circulation computers that show feeds for library news around the world, library blogs, community news, and school news and information streams that it would be helpful for the people working at the desk to know. Here is a picture of my front page.

Now, I’m not going to go into step by step instructions here because the blog is going to be more of an alert to new things rather than an instructional blog, but I will point you to an abundance of instructions and invite you to email me, call me, leave comments here, or visit me any time you want to know more or want help setting up anything. So instead, I’ll post a link to the text instructions and a link to an instructional video. The Press Register Breaking News Feed isn’t in the directory, so I made a gadget. Just click the link and you’ll be asked if you want to add it to your page.

Symbaloo

Personally, I love Google Reader for RSS feeds (news, blogs, friends’ websites, comics….everything), and I use a browser called Flock to help me keep up with social networks, so I was completely ignoring iGoogle when it was my start page and just clicking through to wherever I was actually headed. That’s why Symbaloo has been perfect for me so far. Symbaloo is pretty much just a pretty page with a lot of links that you create, and that works for me. It also has some “widgets” that appear in the middle when you click on them and let you do things like search eBay or Flickr from the page or use a calculator. Actually, being able to search Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Kayak, Photobucket and many others all from my start page is pretty cool, too. It also has a news page and an RSS Reader attached to it, if you feels comfortable using those as well. Here are the links to the Symbaloo introduction video and the page on Symbaloo Frequently Asked Questions. And here’s a peek at my (current) start page.

Alright! I made it through the first post! I’ll be sharing lots of things I already use in the months to come and also alerting you to new things as I hear about them. I’d like to stress again that you are welcome to contact me about setting any of this up. That’s (part of) why they keep me around, and one of my favorite things about this job.

Make sure to leave comments and tell us what you like to use as your start page or ask questions!