I’ve used Google News as my “home” page for quite a while. But today, like so many other formerly useful web sites, they changed the format to something unattractive and awful looking. So buh-bye to them.
Suggest some options for what I should see when I open my browser. I like world and national news, mostly. It would be great if I could find another news aggregator to take the place of what I had.
Every time this question comes up, I suggest Protopage.com. It’s free and you can customize it any way you like, including feeds, widgets, frequently used links, and some other things, too. YOU decide what news feeds you want and how many headlines from each one. Right now I have the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Hill, NPR News, ProPublica, The Christian Science Monitor, Huff Post, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Book Review. I also have links to ALL the sites I visit regularly, clock, a weather widget, a calendar, and a stock ticker. Protopage offers some other widgets, too. Why would anyone use anything else, I always ask myself. (I have no answer to that question.)
This is a screen shot of my current Protopage. On the real page, you can scroll down to see everything.
Never heard of that, thanks. It is nicely configurable and I like it so far.
One bit of weirdness though. I selected a widget for the CNN science feed, and even after refreshing it was giving me stories from years ago. One was about the space shuttle coming in to land tomorrow. Just a bit out of date.
Sounds like a CNN/RSS problem.
I don’t want my browser opening any page until I tell it to. I don’t have a “default” preferred page anyway.
My “home page” is about:blank.
I don’t even like a blank page. I go with a tab-less window in “classic” Opera.
Just a neutral gray background. No speedial, no widgets, not even that idiotic “wheel” thing that Firefox forces on me. (Despite setting the option to turn even that off.)
I also open to a blank page. Then I hit the home icon and Protopage comes up. See, you can have your cake and eat it, too.
I don’t know about you, but my browsers don’t open willy nilly and to whatever random pages they want. When I launch them, they only open the pages I’ve specified. That’s how it works for most people, I would think.
I useigHomefor my start page, and have since iGoogle went away. It is also free, customizable and has a broad selection of widgets.
I always set google itself as my home page–not the news page, just the basic search page.
Otherwise, you could go with the classic Hamsterdance.
It’s possible to have new windows and tabs open to a blank page, but still have your preferred *home page *open when you click the home icon, which may no longer be in the navigation toolbar by default, but is still an option.
Huh, I think it looks much better now. Doesn’t look like it was done in GeoCities from the early 2000s.
Like I said:
The way my computer displays it, Google News has a large categories panel on the left and a smaller but still large misc panel on the right. This leaves a pretty thin area in the middle for the actual content of the page - the news stories. I think it’s awful and wasteful.
Seems like this is a growing trend, shrinking the real estate on web pages. I can sort of understand when it’s to accommodate primarily ad space, but I’m seeing this done for no apparent reason. It really irks me on pages displaying lengthy articles and they have a banner or bottom-of-page dock that just shows what damn site you’re already viewing, and it takes up 30% of the page! That can also screw up page down/up navigation.
I appreciate sites that figure out a good layout and then keep it. Enough with cosmetic changes for the mere sake of them - that’s my advice to web designers, OS designers, pretty much everybody in tech.
