We all have homepages. Some of you may use a simple search engine site. Others may use a specific site that gives them some info they like. And others still may use Netvibes, Pageflakes, MyYahoo, or iGoogle for something a bit more fancy. And for those of you that do - good for you! It’s a great way to centralize a lot of the info you want or need right when you get online.
My homepage (I use iGoogle) has my gmail account, a number of news feeds, google reader, a few links, and weather. And so when I stumble out of bed and plop in front of the computer, I get a quick aerial view of the world.
But why not apply that to other parts of your life? Almost all the major homepage providers allow multiple pages, which allows you to create completely different environments and sets of information all just a click away. So let me give you a suggestion: an academic homepage.
The third column has general news and information. Being a good student (and human being) means being informed about the world - and this is one of the ways I do it. This is a mix of slightly better than average media sources (Slate and Salon), general news feeds (Headlines), and academic and very solid news sources (Arts and Letters Daily, New Scientist, Foreign Policy). My actual RSS* feeds are quite a bit bigger, but for most people this is more than enough.
In the fourth column (you may only want one, two, or even three columns - I have a wide screen, so this works for me.) I’ve a few utilities and handy things. PDF converter, grammar guide, dictionary, and thesaurus.
And that’s it. It takes MINUTES to set this up, but just a click and spending a bit of time on this page daily will keep you up to date on the world and your field.
*I do plan on discussing news and RSS feeds a bit later, but for now - you can find plenty just by searching around the “Add stuff” area.
19/09/2007 at 12:03 pm Permalink
I’ve been doing this for a while. It works fantastically. I originally started doing it to keep myself from “wandering” off on the internet. I used to wake up at 6:00 and stumble over to the computer to make sure all the major countries are still here. I’d get sidetracked and wind up looking at videos of cute puppies on youtube two hours later.
Now, unless I’ve got free time to play around on the net, everything is on my igoogle home page and I very rarely leave it.
It’s gotten even better now that I figured out I can sync my gCal to my iPod. So I’m actually using it now, much easier than my old pocket planner.
19/09/2007 at 1:37 pm Permalink
I use Pageflakes, and it really makes things a lot easier. It´s indeed better to use the internet with a purpose in mind, than to “roam” it without a destiny, wasting time. As I tend to get sidetracked when I don’t keep a clear purpose while using the internet, then it also helps me a lot.
20/09/2007 at 3:20 pm Permalink
i have a pageflakes page too. it’s a very neat tool i think. i use it mainly for news feeds, weather and email. also has a nice local events flake which i have set to my location ;-)
kev