Since uploading this site late, late Monday evening/early Tuesday morning, I’ve spent the past few days enhancing various parts of the site, mostly navigation and cleaning up a rather bare-bone interface. One of the things my friend convinced me to do was move all my old posts over here, which I had previously scrapped but turned out to be fairly simple (an hour’s worth of time writing a PHP script to migrate database entries, basically). Yay for suggestions; I actually keep a “to do” list now of all the self-inflicted and suggested improvements.
And I do it on a portal homepage called Netvibes. Based in France, these guys are a Web 2.0 startup who had the best portal product out at the time I was looking (maybe 4 or 5 months back) and kept on improving it, even as juggernauts like Microsoft’s Live.com and Google’s Personalized Homepage moved into the same space quickly with their free offerings.
For those not familiar with Web 2.0 portals, they’re basically customized homepages that hold a collection of RSS feeds, useful widgets such as weather, stock tickers and to do lists, as well as integration with other Web 2.0 products such as picture-sharing sites (e.g. Flickr and online storage spaces, I use box.net) all unified onto a single page. If you’ve never used one before and you were like me – having 20-30 bookmarks that you manually visit every morning – portal pages are a great time saver.
So yea, I really like Netvibes, with their clean interface, their modules which tend to fit a lot of information in a small amount of space, their integration with other sites, and how fast they update the engine with new features and bug fixes. Here’s what I have on my browser, pretty much at all times:
Have I convinced you yet?