For several years, I’ve used My Yahoo as my homepage when I open my internet browser. It is very customizable, so you can have it display news, temperature/weather forecast, sports scores for your favorite teams, comic strips, Dear Abby columns, and the like. However, starting a couple of months ago, the quality of the Yahoo News Top Stories section has declined greatly. Instead of showing the most important headlines of the day, I see crap like this (copied verbatim, except for my commentary in italics):
HK movie mogul Run Run Shaw has died at age 107 “- 17 minutes ago” who the fuck is that?
Airlines cancel flights as cold hobbles operations “- 27 minutes ago” fair enough that this should be listed
French company demos driverless shuttle at CES “- 28 minutes ago” fair enough
Biden calls Iraqi leaders amid sectarian violence “- 28 minutes ago” fair enough
MakerBot goes bigger, with head-sized 3-D printer “- 30 minutes ago” don’t care, but I guess it might be sort of newsworthy
Salvage job for United in League Cup semis “- 32 minutes ago” why the hell is this important? Are they talking about Manchester United? DC United? United Airlines?
Japan whalers driven from hunting ground, says Sea Shepherd “- 33 minutes ago” OK
BCS WATCH: Auburn takes 14-3 lead over Florida St “- 34 minutes ago” definitely not newsworthy, except perhaps when the game is over
Are there any alternatives that will show me real news in addition to the temperature and the scores of teams I actually like?
Every time someone asks this question, I always answer
Fully customizable including background colors. I have boxes with my often-used links (about 20 of them including this board), rss links to top 15 stories in NY Times, Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, CNN, Time, Wired, plus Rotten Tomatoes, and a few others. I have a calendar, a digital clock, a list of my top stocks with updating prices, a widget with phases of the moon. The free version has an ad banner at the top, but if you scroll down a bit, you can hide it. You can also have multiple tabs. There’s nothing visible on the page that you don’t put there.
I change the colors to match whatever wallpaper I’m currently using, as I don’t like my active windows filling the whole screen.
Google has a few new gizmos especially for mobile devices. Very cool. Detecting where you are, it gives weather info along with driving time/directions to places you frequent.
When I first open a new Firefox window, I have it set to blank. I leave my protopage window up or minimized throughout the day. One nice thing, if you go on another computer, you can open PP and your important links are there. For example, when I open PP on my kindlefire, all the links that I routinely use are there without me having to bookmark them in Dolphin, the kindle browser that I use.
Since the demise of iGoogle, which I hated to see go away, I have been using
Sets up very much like iGoogle and I have had no issues with any of the widgets I selected (4 different news sources including one amalgamator, weather, stocks, Google Translate and, of course, Calvin and Hobbes daily strip). There are a ton of widgets to choose from, I tend to keep my home page pretty spartan, though.
Well, I was just playing with protopage for the last hour and I believe you’ve changed my life with that suggestion, Thelma Lou. I absolutely adore it! I have a nice purple and green color scheme, a calendar, a nice greeting to myself, word-of-the-day, and on and on. I’m feeling such a sense of satisfaction, I can’t tell you! Many thanks for the tip!
I just changed my page to Protopage as ThelmaLou suggests. I’m not sure if I can make it display scores of my favorite teams, though, so I may end up switching it back. On the plus side, I was able to add Ke$ha’s Twitter feed, which isn’t possible on My Yahoo.