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Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?

147 points| yosito | 4 years ago

By personal start page, I mean a custom-made web page that you would set as the home page in your browser and use it as the starting point of doing things in the browser.

I'm considering building something with Next.js or Gatsby that I can self-host, but I'd love suggestions of the most customizable tools that would allow me to quickly integrate data "widgets" from diverse sources like Nextcloud, Fastmail, RSS readers (Inoreader, maybe), CalDAV, bank accounts, etc.

116 comments

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[+] mbreese|4 years ago|reply
This sounds an awful lot like a portal that was so popular around 2000. That’s the way it used to be. You’d setup a personal portal on Yahoo or MSN or iGoogle or whomever provided your email. Then you’d load up whatever widgets you wanted and placed them in an organized grid. News and fresh content was populated by RSS and you’d have you own personal start page on the Internet.

The goal for any portal site was to convince you to spend more time on the portal (this is how we got {Yahoo,Google} news). The more time on the portal was more ad impressions they could sell. Social media didn’t like sharing content this way and so portals became significantly less popular.

I’d forgotten how much I’d missed those.

[+] dolmen|4 years ago|reply
I think that portals lost traction much before social media rise.

I switched to Altavista, Google because of the lightweight home page.

[+] spicybright|4 years ago|reply
iGoogle <3 that name brings back a lot of memories.

It's too bad they're not popular anymore. Well... they ARE popular, only we let facebook and twitter decide what we see.

[+] pacificmint|4 years ago|reply
It's been years since I had one, and when I did it was plain, static html only. So I don't have any personal recommendations.

But in case you weren't aware, there is a subreddit for startpages (because, of course there is), you might find some inspiration and ideas there:

https://old.reddit.com/r/startpages/

[+] Venkatesh10|4 years ago|reply
One more interesting to subscribe to, Thanks! I've been thinking to build a curated list of websites across different subjects, do you think there's an aggregation subreddit or tool to build one as well?
[+] acklenx|4 years ago|reply
It's called a "home page". You even say that yourself. It's why the browser has a "home" button ... To take you to your (personal) home page. And even before that button and [saved] bookmarks, you had to have some place that contained your personal bookmarks. It was the page you set your browser to load when you opened it. And you did absolutely make it yourself (it was the first webpage I ever made).

The main/first page of a website was the "frontpage" to its visitors (but it surely felt like a home page to the owner - and it may have been).

In any web event, I think you will be best served by plain old html. It will be faster (in nearly all ways) than next.js or Gatsby.

[+] biztos|4 years ago|reply
I agree that a lot of browsers call it the "home page" or similar, but I don't think a lot of people call it that, so the term is ambiguous at best. How many people know that their browser has a Start Page (often customizable) and a Home Page (optional, pick a URL) in the first place?

Last time I had one, it was a big collection of work-related links, back when you could fit all the "important" documentation portals for a LAMP stack on one screen. :-)

[+] vladstudio|4 years ago|reply
Oh please please may I shamelessly link to the Vlad.studio new tab extension [0] - I built it to solve this exact problem for myself, but also as another way for my wallpapers to be seen. This is how my new tab page looks now: [1]

[0] https://new-tab.vlad.studio/

[1] https://i.postimg.cc/y8R3x0Yt/my-new-tab.jpg

[+] orangepurple|4 years ago|reply
Looks pretty, and good job. Due to my background I prefer to be confronted with a color coded wall of text and charts ordered by importance and designed like 2000s Japanese websites.
[+] bloopernova|4 years ago|reply
That looks great!

Do you know of any similar efforts for Firefox?

[+] jstx1|4 years ago|reply
Empty new tab in Firefox works great. There are also blank new tab extensions if you use Chrome.
[+] lovelyviking|4 years ago|reply
What is exactly works great about it?

It is useless. Also this is what I have to deal with instead of my homepage opened.

I cannot open my homepage from local file on a new tab and they do not fix it for years.

What should happen in their strange brains to understand that this is basic functionality and it is not working! If home page doesn't work the browser doesn't work.

Homepage from local file can be opened on a first tab. It is a bug if firefox can't do the same on a next tab. How difficult to comprehend this for firefox team?

[+] bovermyer|4 years ago|reply
I, too, rely on a completely blank tab.

I've never seen a need for a "start" page. The context when I open a browser changes almost every time; I never follow a routine.

[+] k8sToGo|4 years ago|reply
My start page url is about:blank
[+] chrismorgan|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, I have never desired anything but about:blank.

But I seldom see even that, because instead of opening a tab and then typing in a URL or query, I’ll type in the URL or query and press Alt+Enter which opens that URL or query in a new tab.

And even in Firefox’s Private Browsing windows, I have this in my userContent.css so that I get a blank page there too (I started doing this when they put an ad for their VPN service, but then like Haman of old scorned to kill just .vpn-promo):

  @-moz-document url("about:privatebrowsing") {
      body {
          display: none !important;
      }
  }
[+] trutannus|4 years ago|reply
Empty tab, with Firefox containers that automatically capture all google searches and open them in new tabs. That's what I have set up on my personal laptop.
[+] sumtechguy|4 years ago|reply
For me I have 3 variations. Blank page, some search landing page, or my.yahoo.com, thought the last one I am moving away from as less sites have RSS feeds.
[+] LuisMondragon|4 years ago|reply
I use the empty dark new page extension for chrome/brave. The empty new tab was too bright for my dark environment.
[+] quintenps|4 years ago|reply
I've built a start page a while ago, if you're interested you can change the config and use it yourself. https://github.com/Quintenps/Startpagev2

What I really like about my personal start page is it's RSS feed. I found this article through that :). Other features are of course the bookmarks and light/dark theme.

Don't forget to use new tab redirect (my favorite) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab-redirect/i... it highlights the URL bar so when you're not interested in clicking a bookmark you can do a search query right away.

[+] visiblink|4 years ago|reply
Just to contribute to the general discussion, I use Bookmarks Home add-on for firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmarkshome...). It turns your bookmarks into a homepage. You can customize which bookmarks folders appear and tweak the css. You can also save the page to html and turn off or remove the add-on if you like.

It does not include widget support though, so it doesn't address all of the issues mentioned in the original post.

[+] satran|4 years ago|reply
I have a custom built system: https://github.com/satran/edi It does two things I have longed in other systems:

- uses plain text files as storage

- embedded option to run shell scripts while rendering. Eg `!date +%D` would execute date and insert contents.

The part of using text files was that I can leverage unix tools. This allowed me to grep for todos, follow up things. Keep a format that works for me.

To your question about widgets, it mainly renders Markdown dolls so adding HTML should be simple.

[+] memset|4 years ago|reply
I built one! I’ve tried to monetize it but I’ve given up on that. This is why there is literally nothing on the home page except a login link, which you’re free to try out.

https://www.homepagr.com/

Anyway, if anyone’s breve enough to try it out, I’d be interested in your feedback! Always wanted to make this a tool for teams to share their common bookmarks and links with one another.

I have a chrome and Firefox extension too to ensure the new tab page is set to homepagr. It also has screenshots of what it looks like after logging in.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/homepagr/

[+] fractal618|4 years ago|reply
New tab page or more recently I've set my start page to a procedurally generated weather forecast image file hosted at weather.gov it works really well and it loads instantly which is critical for any start page in my opinion
[+] ajot|4 years ago|reply
I used speeddials for some years, then some other obscure addons and local html files. A few years ago, via G-Hacks, I found Humble New Tab Page[0], and it's been love at first sight. It has some little quirks if you are clumsy as I am and move a folder to another column, but it's not that hard to undo by hand. As a plus, it was a good excuse to bookmark frequent pages and put them inside folders.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/humble-new-ta...

[+] ents|4 years ago|reply
you can lock columns!
[+] dec0dedab0de|4 years ago|reply
That's actually where I first used my username. It was dec0dedab0de.local And the server had the same mac address, which I thought was fun. It's been over a decade now, but I used a locally hosted media wiki instance, and had some bash/python scripts running on a cron to scrape various sources and update the wiki.

I wouldn't do it like that now, but the ability to quickly make wiki style edits is very useful. Plus having data stored locally before you need it is very convenient, and comes in handy during the occasional outage.

[+] elaus|4 years ago|reply
I use a small Ruby script that fetches some RSS feeds and creates a static HTML page with that content. The script gets executed via cronjob and is hosted locally on my machine, served via python's integrated web server. That way I have basically no loading time when opening a new tab and I'm independant from 3rd party services that close down or change in unwanted ways.

I use the 'New Tab Redirect' extension to set a local web page for new tabs in Chromium.

[+] jordanmorgan10|4 years ago|reply
I built swiftjectivec.com using Jekyll and Netlify. I’m in the iOS world by trade, and over the last decade web technology and the flavor of the week has changed faster than I care to keep up with. So this simple, dare I say “dumb” setup, is perfect for me. I also use the same approach for stuff I sell too, such as bestinclassiosapp.com

For me, the simplest thing with the smallest amount of failure points is key.

[+] captainmisery|4 years ago|reply
At my job I made a "startpage" on our shared drive. Just an index.html that most of the company now uses. It contains links to all our internal tools en company sites. Layout is a simple css card grid. Its grouped per department so a specificatie link is easy to find.

Out of all the things I created I still get the most positive feedback on a single html file I mostly created for myself.

[+] linsomniac|4 years ago|reply
A few weeks ago I did some research and started using the Toby tab manager plugin for Firefox and Chrome: https://www.gettoby.com/

I set up a "Frequent" tab group at the top, which has the pages that I often go to but that have weird URLs that I always struggle a little to find the right URL.

I really started using it for cross-machine tab parking. I always end up with a ton of tabs open across 2 chromebooks and my work machine, and "OneTab" helps, but has no ability to manage across multiple machines or browsers. With Toby I created sections for "Tooling Research", "General Work Research", "Logging and Monitoring", and individual projects that I seem to always want to get back to by leaving tabs open.

The down side is it takes a good 2 seconds when I hit "new tab" for it to load. I have been quite happy with it though.

[+] justinlloyd|4 years ago|reply
I have a completely static, light-weight homepage, with some clean CSS styling to provide me with my stepping off point.

There are Python scripts that fill the content of the page and generate the markup for me. Those Python scripts go out and grab the price of various crypto currencies in my portfolio, several comic strips, the front page of hackernews, some cute cat pictures from reddit, my bank balance, the subjects in my email inbox, discord messages for work, the messages from my linkedin account, weather for the next three days, upcoming bills to pay, and a few other bits and pieces, along with several links to sites I regularly visit.

I thought about a Google search box but then I use Alfred/Albert/Wox, or can simply hit CTRL+L when the browser is open.

I have set up and taken off many ideas over the years, e.g. a link to open up OneNote and create a new entry, but then I just press WIN/CMD/SUP+N, or links to websites I only occasionally visit. What I have generally avoided is just having links to sites, e.g. github, LinkedIn, without those links being something that provided useful information.

Everything is stored in plain text files. I have a few .ini files that need a little more structure.

Some scripts run every few minutes (update email inbox), but most scripts run every 12 hours (crypto currency prices, comic strips, etc). My homepage Python scripts sit on my main server, and have been plodding along quietly for over 25 years, with occasional updates as I've added new features, e.g. linkedin, or changed email providers.

With separate, external scripts that output blocks of HTML, if one of the scripts breaks for whatever reason, e.g. a webiste updated or the API keys expired, nothing breaks on my homepage. It just keeps trucking. If a script breaks, it simply generates an empty HTML block.

There is nothing interactive or dynamic on the page, which means it is viewable and usable and on almost every device out there.