The internet offers a variety of startpages and we have also covered quite a few. Some of these pages offer an appealing interface while others offer the most popular website shortcuts; some offer search engine integration while others offer good customization options; in other words, each type of startpage has its own flaws and fortes.

“YourPort” is a unique startpage that combines all these fortes into a singular package.

Introduction

YourPort is a brilliant startpage that combines the strongest elements of all startpage types. The site offers default shortcuts as well as customized URL shortcuts with support for bookmark synchronization. Multiple search engine integration is included that lets you search different types of web content. And the best parts about it all are that the site is absolutely free to use and does not require any registrations.

Usage and Features

When you first visit YourPort you will view search engine features at the top of the site’s page. To search for anything you can type in your query, select the sort of results you want – web, images, maps, or video – and then execute the search.

By default the search engine is Google; this can always be changed to one of the alternatives offered: Yahoo, AltaVista, Bing, AOL, or Ask.

Towards the bottom of the page you will find the most popular web shortcuts already present by default. The site refers to these shortcuts as ‘ports.’ Clicking on any one of these shortcuts will take you to the respective website.

In the top left of these shortcuts you will notice buttons that let you create custom tabs that include your own shortcuts. New tabs can be created and existing ones can be renamed or deleted.

For fresh tabs you will find empty shortcut slots as shown in the image below.

To add new shortcuts simply click on the “Add new site +” button and enter the shortcut’s URL in the subsequent window.

Alternatively you can select from a list of popular sites already available in YourPort’s options. To access these options place the mouse pointer in the top right of an empty slot. A ‘Popular Sites’ button will appear that will contain options to add the shortcuts for popular websites; these websites will be sorted in the menu categorically.

While adding site shortcuts you do not need to adhere to any positioning rules. You can start filling the shortcuts in whichever order you are comfortable with. You can fill all the empty shortcut slots or only some of them.

With the shortcuts created you can always reorganize them via simple click-and-drag action through the mouse.

When it comes to adding shortcuts you can save considerable time by importing your browser’s bookmarks into YourPort. This option can be accessed through the button in the top right.

The “Share this tab” option lets you quickly share your customized tabs with your contacts. A direct URL can be obtained for the tab so you can land on your favorite ports tab rather than the default tab.

Conclusion

With its simple interface, user-friendliness, and richness of features YourPort serves as an excellent startpage. To quickly access your most frequented websites, all you have to do is start using YourPort. Once you begin using the site it will quite easily replace whichever startpage you are currently using.

Visit YourPort @ http://www.yourport.com/

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In a homepage, useability is a big part of whether it catches on or not. Another important thing to consider, is whether it does everything you need it to.

If you read the post on Kadaza recently, you have an idea of what a logo based homepage is. Symbaloo takes it one step further. With other homepages, you can add sites. Usually you see a link, however, you may see a logo or the favicon representing the site. What Symbaloo does (for the news) is shows you a picture based on the trending information.

Starting out

You can see by the main page, the layout is simple, yet offers a lot of information. You can see the 52 squares with a spot to search right in the middle.

On the top of the 52 squares, you will also see tabs. These are similar to tabs in your browser. You can have lots of information open, yet not feel like you are cluttered. The default tabs are: Home Webmix, Webmix, News highlights and Major news.

What I like about the tabs, is if you have a topic you are really interested in such as the Android OS or social media, you can do a quick search and find a bunch of different webmixes related to your interest. A webmix is a collection of different sites revolving around the same topic.

Social media

Android

Personalizing the page

You can personalize the page by adding sites you like to or replacing one of the squares. To add a site to an empty square, just click on it. A window will appear at the top of the screen with a search window.

I chose coffee as an example. After typing it into the search bar, 6 possible choices are displayed. Select the site you’d like by clicking on it. When you do, it will populate the square you chose.

Premade Tabs

Another way to use Symbaloo is by using the premade tabs.

The major news tab consists of 9 blocks. Each block is an RSS feed for a major US news source.

The news highlights tab is the most picturesque. The tab shows a collage of trending news topics.

The webmix collection tab is by-far the most informational. It crams shortcuts to lots and lots of webmixes into one window. The defaults range from fastest cars to going green, and even Oprah. When you click on a collection, you will see a webmix with a bunch of sites related to the topic. Here is what the fast car webmix looks like.

For all of the Firefox users out there, you can use the Firefox add-on to bookmark sites to Symbaloo. When the add-on is installed, it appears in the top right of your browser window. You will see a shortcut to Symbaloo and one to bookmark the site.

When you bookmark a site, you can do some minor cosmetic changes. If you group similar bookmarks by color, this is where you can make the car background for your Ferrari bookmark red like the others.

Conclusion

I have to say, even though Symbaloo looks very simple, you can really do a lot to it. Between the tabs, default webmixes and personalizing your own, you can pack a ton of information onto your homepage. It is really easy to use and if you are looking for something a bit more flashy, Symbaloo will do the trick.

Of the many possible homepages, how do you choose what works best for you?

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iGoogle

If you use a lot of Google products, you likely already know iGoogle. It can work with or without a Google account, however the account is wise to have if you’d like to save your settings permanently, or use the gadgets for Google services like Gmail.

Not surprisingly, the biggest edge iGoogle has over its competitors is the integration with other Google services. The Gmail app, for instance, not only displays unread counts and summaries but also lets you read, reply, and compose messages without leaving the iGoogle page.

Visually, iGoogle can look quite nice thanks largely to its collection of artist themes. iGoogle includes themes designed by well known artists and professionals specifically for their web service.

Of course none of these services would be complete without a collection of gadgets to embed. iGoogle’s gadget collection is quite large, and includes everything from a live NPR stream to Twilight quotes.

The one place where iGoogle may leave you wanting is in customization. While gadgets can be moved around to different locations, most of the page is stuck in a standard configuration. The rather large search area at the top of the screen, for example, cannot be moved or removed, and color schemes are tied directly to the theme.

Netvibes

Where iGoogle excels with Google product integration, it’s somewhat lacking in customization. Netvibes is quite the opposite, and includes far more customization options regarding the layout and appearance of your page. Color and theme information can be changed independently, and the design allows for user control over aspects like the search bar, which iGoogle has frozen in size and placement.

One nice aspect of Netvibes is that it allows you to take the feed widgets on your page and treat them all as one feed. If you click the Reader View button at the top of your page, your page will be reformatted into something quite similar to Google Reader and other RSS feed managers.

Netvibes also has an excellent gadget selector, allowing you to browse and search for whatever gadgets you may need. It places more emphasis on feeds than iGoogle or Pageflakes, so many of the items you’ll find in the Add Content screen are not web apps or gadgets, they are just RSS and Atom type feeds.

Pageflakes

The main thing Pageflakes offers over the other two options is simplicity. You don’t have the fancy visual effects of Netvibes or the extensive gadget library of iGoogle, but you do have a comparatively fast site with minimal fuss. That does, however, mean it lacks some of the capability of the other two. The Gmail gadget (in this case called a flake) requires your account be set up for POP access (something I tend to keep disabled) and the overall selection of flakes is somewhat small compared to the other two.

Pageflakes also supports RSS/Atom feeds as flakes, allowing you to embed individual feeds to the location of your choice on the page. It does not, however, have anything equivalent to Netvibes’ Reader View.

When it comes to adding new gadgets or flakes, this site doesn’t have much to make it stand above the alternatives. There is no option to search the collection, and it’s been this author’s experience that many of the flakes given do not seem to deliver the promised functionality. While this may be related to my local browser setup (Chrome on 64 bit Linux), I did not experience these problems on Netvibes or iGoogle.

Conclusion

Pageflakes, unfortunately, seems to come in last from most perspectives. Both iGoogle and Netvibes have their strong points, making it hard to pick a clear winner. iGoogle is likely best if you use a lot of other Google services (Gmail, Reader, Voice, etc), but in most other ways Netvibes seems to be the strongest player. Its flexibility, simplicity, and extensive content collection make it a very useful place to begin when you get online.

What’s your homepage? Let us know in the comments below.

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Password and bookmark managers have been around for a while and are widly used and talked about on the web. Custom homepages like iGoogle and 43marks have also been written about many many times.

Myhomepage.com is a marriage of these 3 concepts.

Once you sign up for an account you will be taken to the dashboard area. You will see these tabs: My Homepage, My Bookmarks, My Password Vault and Auto Logins.

My Homepage

The My Homepage tab will be pretty empty in the beginning. Once you start adding sites you want to auto login to, you will see things here. I have added a few sites that I would like to auto login so you can see what it looks like.

Bookmarks

Adding a bookmark is one of two ways, on the site using the search bar, or using a handy bookmarklet.

Just like using a search engine, type in the site or keyword you want to find. You will see a bunch of results. If you type in a website’s full address, you will see something like the picture below with the best result displayed a little larger.

The bookmarklet method is great for when you are surfing and you come across something you want to to revisit. To use the bookmarklet, drag the button up to your bookmark bar. It is located on the left side in the bookmark tab.

To use it, simply go to your bookmark bar and click on it when you are on a web page you want to save. A window will pop up with options for a tag, description and name of the page.

After you fill in the basic info, and save it, you can now access the site from the bookmark tab. Currently, importing bookmarks from your browser is not available, but this feature is in the works.

Auto Login

Setting a site to auto login enables you log in to any of the sites you set up. Setting up a site is a couple step process.

1. Bookmark the site described above.

2. Drag the Auto Login bookmarklet to your bookmark bar. This will be how it knows when you want to sign in.

3. In the auto login tab, there are some sites added by default. If you would like to use auto login for any of these sites, click on the little blue tab in the bottom right corner next to where it says the site name. Click the option that says Edit Auto Login.

4. Fill in your login information and click save.

Now, when you visit that site, you can just click the Auto Login bookmarklet and you are logged in.

Conclusion

In playing with these options, I found out that you need to be logged into myhompage for things to work. You don’t need to have the page open in a tab or window. The easiest way to make sure you are logged in is to set myhompage.com as your homepage. (There is a link on the top of the page.) This way, when you fire up your browser, you can make sure you are signed in. You will also have all of your bookmarked sites right at your finger tips.

Do you think the merging of two great services like this will take off?

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When I am sitting at my desk and trying to focus on work, it is all too easy to lend my attention to something much more interesting than what I should be doing. Going to a search site or looking at the auto suggestions when typing in a bookmark tag can easily steal your attention.

I have recently been trying out a different homepage at work. 43marks isn’t as flashy as some of the homepages out there, but flashy is usually distracting. How 43marks differs from other homepages, is how much it offers in such a simple layout. 43marks combines two things people use on a daily basis: bookmarks and search engines.

Having four options to search at your fingertips without all of the typical distractions and random links associated with some sites is a breath of fresh air. Google, Yahoo, Bing and Wikipedia are probably the most commonly used search engines. All of them aggregate the “top sites” in a different way. Type in a search term and get the results from Google; to see what Yahoo,Bing or Wikipedia simply click that tab and the results shift to the other search engine’s results.

To personalize your 43marks homepage, follow these steps:

1. Click on the the “customize yours” tab in the top right corner of the main page.

2. Enter in a user name, email address and a password twice.

3. Once you are all set up, you will have a default list of bookmarks and RSS feeds.

4. To change the bookmarks and RSS feeds, click [Manage]

5. Three options are presented to you: Manage Bookmarks, Manage RSS Feeds and User Settings.

If you want to wipe the slate clean, 43marks does give an option to delete all bookmarks.

6. In the RSS Manage RSS Feeds tab, the same option to start from scratch is available.

* A pretty easy way to add a feed is to click on the RSS icon most sites have. This will pull up a page with the feed address listed. The feed URL should look something like this – http://feeds.feedburner.com/MakeTechEasier

The RSS part works well, but if you want to change a feed from ESPN to Make Tech Easier, you need to delete the old one and add in the new name and address.

7. In the User Settings, you are presented a four options:

• Choose whether you want your page to be private or public so anyone can see your list of bookmarks and RSS feeds. If you choose public, just give our the URL to your page. Mine is 43marks.com/trevor_dobrygoski

• How you would like the RSS feeds displayed – Expanded or collapsed
• The maximum number of books marks to display in each category column
• How you want the bookmark or RSS link to open when clicked

With all of the distractions present to anyone who works online, 43marks is a great solution to wrangle the information you NEED to look at and none that you don’t.

What tools do you use to cut down on distractions when you work online?

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