Homepage Startup
Rating: 4
Version tested: 8/31/2007
Description: Homepage Startup is a web service that consists of a page of thumbnailed website links intended to be used as a home page. Users can define the URLs they would like on their page and arrange their positions at will by simply dragging them.
A couple of months ago I put together my own browser home page using an HTML editor that is very similar to this. I noticed, at the time, that I was using about a dozen websites almost every single day, so I put links to these on a page, clustered by category, and made that my home page.
Homepage Startup does something very similar to what I describe above, although by using thumbnails it certainly looks much prettier than my page of links. Note that Hompage Startup is neither a so-called webtop (i.e. a web-based desktop such as Pageflakes, Netgear, or Protopage), no’r is it as a social bookmarking site in the vein of Del.icio.us.
Here are some notes on this service:
- Layout: You can create a page with any configuration of up to 5 rows and 5 columns (i.e. max number of possible links = 25).
- No ads: which I must say is a very good thing for a service such as this.
- Customization: choose your preferred background color. You can also choose whether you want your boxes to be moveable or fixed. Drag your thumbnails around to arrange them, but they do tend to behave a bit unpredictably.
- Sharing: choose between having a private vs. a shared page. In case of the latter your page Url would be: http://<your-username>.homepagestartup.com.
- Search box: set to Google by default but can be changed to any of the major (and some not so major) engines.
My wish list:
- A “snap to grid” command or setting. Once you start moving your thumbnails around, its hard to keep them in a nice alignment.
- The ability to create text labels and move them around (in order to describe the themes of clustered thumbnails).
- More than 5 rows (how about 10 rows, guys).
- Real thumbnails from any page. Currently, thumbnails are taken from the root domain (e.g. google.com/adsense, google.com/reader, and google.com/analytics all have the same thumbnail, despite that they look very different from the main google page).
- Thumbnails for local (network) pages. These currently do not seem to be supported.
- Bugs: for some reason I had to define each page twice before it would take. Is this a bug? If so I am sure it will be promptly fixed.
All in all an interesting service which I find very exciting and plan to use.
Go to the Homepage Startup page.
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Nice find! Looks interestingly good, will check it out.
If you only have a few pages you want to use alot you can set them up in tabs in Firefox and save multiple pages as your homepages.
tools/options/use current pages (as home page)
I was switching from Firefox to Opera, because Opera had some nice features like Mouse Gestures and the Startuppage/homepage like this site. This site made me actually switch back to Firefox, together with the MouseGestures Add on.
Sad to see you’re going back to FF. If ever you want a lean and innovative browser, get Opera again.
Man, when I first saw Speed Dial, I hid it from view and almost forgot about it. Until one of my internet buddies showed me “the light.” Now everyone else seems to want to emulate it. Nice.
The thumbnails don’t offer a setting for scroll position so page banners fill up the frames. I’ve sent feedback asking for that to be added. Also, the thumbnails are remotely generated. That means ad blockers don’t work. It sure would be nice to have this as a locally stored page so ad blockers and other custom settings could be done properly and also a little more privacy.
I made a similar program as yours it takes a list of urls in a text file and converts them into an HTML webpage with each page opening in a new window.
Link to utilities page: http://www.geocities.com/rich_stol/utilities.htm
Nice service, but still needs some work! There are more bugs than listed here above. I kept losing one of my favorit blogs, no matter how many times I added it again.
Besides that, there is a small privacy concern. For me the really useful part of this site is that you can access your bookmarks from any computer on the globe. But this can only be done by making your homepage public. There should be something like password protection.
Firefox has an add-on called SpeedDial that does a better job
it (homepage) has not worked for me in almost a wk!
темпе антимаулнетизм как антимаулнетизм