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Home Page

For a while now, I’ve been looking around for a start page that I like as well as an rss reader that works for me. Google and Live.com both offer personalized start pages that I have used, but they never really did it for me. I’ve downloaded RSS Bandit and while it works ok, I’m not a fan of the old folder based visual structure. Recently I came across a site called Netvibes – and have started (as of yesterday) using it as my home page on my browsers at home and the site I keep open in the background while I’m at work.

Here’s a screenshot of my “home” tab on Netvibes:

netvibes-screenshot

Each section can be dragged to another part of the page if you want to rearrange the order. You can change how many items each feed displays (from 1 – 25), when you mouse over an item, a box displays more of the story (I believe it’s an Ajax thing). With multiple tabs, I can seperate out the sites I want to keep track of and quickly scan like-minded sites for current news.

There’s a bunch of other functions that I haven’t really explored yet. Including an Ebay module, Alexa traffic and a MySpace module. What I have added is the video search that allows you to play YouTube videos right from within the Netvibes page. The design for how YouTube displays right on the page is excellent.

While the overall look is nothing spectacular, it is decent and clean–no messy crowding of the screen or extraneous baubles. I like the flexibility and the ease of organization. I may very well get bored with it, but for now it’s a compact and useful start page on my browsers.

I would love to know what you think or if you have any other suggestions for start pages. Lifehacker has a number of suggestions if you want to learn about other start page sites.

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