Slashdot Mirror
What's Your Browser Start Page?
prostoalex asks: "I was just reading an Associated Press story on the most popular Web destinations, where it's noted how the companies are vying for user's attention to become an access point to the Internet. Slashdot's readership is probably not the one to stick to the start page provided by their ISP or their browser manufacturer. What's your browsers start page? A third-party site like Google or Yahoo!? A customized page like My Yahoo! or My MSN? Personal Web site or local HTML file with your favorite bookmarks? about:blank?"
Nuthin better. Good & fast...
I use firefox, you insensitive clod. I have as many start pages as I like! I actually use only two: drpa.us and peter-a-andrews.com/links.html, both of which are my personal pages.
Duh. Actually, for a while it was the New York Times. Then Geek.com. For the last few years, it's been Slashdot.
news.google.com
Haven't switched since they started it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I find at least half of my browsing when initially opening a window is a search, so naturally I have it set to google.com. It also makes using the home button convenient to start a search.
I imagine the majority of the responses will be for search engines or some sort of portal page (be it personal or externally provided ala yahoo/etc).
"I drank what?" -Socrates
At the bottom, I have a form field I can use to have CGI tag extra URLs onto the page if there's something I want to look at later. The last ten URLs are remembered, and I manually edit the page to move them into the sections if I decide to keep the URL.
Previously -- I used to have a page dynamically generated from my squid* access logs. This was a page of my 25 most-accessed sites** as well as some manually-entered sites for banking and similar static stuff. I stopped doing this as it got to be a headache to constantly add exceptions for ad servers and the likes.
* you probably knew that squid is a web proxy. I use ssh to port-forward from home to work so I get logs for both places, as well as being able to keep goatse.cx, lemon party, and penisbird out of the logs
** counting any number of accesses after the first in an 8hr period as one access
I also used to include a chart of my company's stock, but that got to be a whole lot less fun about 3 months ago.
~Darl
My start page has four text areas:
google search
alta-vista search
google groups search
debian package search
its locally cached, so load time is epsilon.
Where else can I get my News for Nerds?
that that is is that that is not is not
My start page is Slashdot of course! My second choice would be google or perhaps blank.
Clean and effective
~RWS
To maximize window-opening speed, I switched from Google.com to about:blank. But then, I had no Google, so I added the Google toolbar. Now I have acheived start-page nirvana.
www.drudgereport.com
followed by
Slashdot
myYahoo with RSS beta &
Fark
and that will usually waste 1-2 hours for me each morning...
I'm sure if i changed that, i'd get WAY more done.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage
Gives me a Random Wikipedia entry each time I open a browser window. I've buckets of information that I would never otherwise have any inclination to research, but have found very interesting..
Colin Davis
Though I just have Opera open with no windows.
Googlenews... but then I always go straight to slashdot. The two best sources for news on the net, IMHO.
--If the world didn't suck, we'd all fall off.
I use plain Google (my wife uses Google advanced ) because its the most used page on the internet for us. I previously to use a customized Yahoo finance page (an Excite page before that) but they took too long to load.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
So, this is where we see who the loyal oldies are, eh? ;)
I wonder what Cmdr Taco's start up is.....
Because that way, I know what I'm in for when I get into work.
Used some ideas out of my web technology course to generate all of the filenames for my comics that I like to read. Though it doesn't work if the artist has something that modifies the file name. It's getting on in years though. It'll be time to come up with something else. Besides, now that I'm finishing school, and providing I can find some work, it'll be worth to start putting some towards the artists themselves, without having to go through some jerks like the RIAA.
I can't spell ripburger
I've been using about:blank for years now, and really was too lazy to change from home.netscape.com before that.
I do it to decrease loading times. There are certainly about 10 websites I routinely look at each day, but I might not be popping up a window to look at any of those.
Also, back around when I switched to about:blank, I was having trouble with my Internet connection's reliability. I think I was using a free Internet provider on a 486 running Linux or something... no joke. Not automatically loading a page, with early-generation browsers, could save you a lot of time while it stopped being confused about the lack of any network to talk to.
inkfeed
in IE, for those visiting relatives who dare use my computer.
It was my relatives who told me the goatse guy is wearing a wedding ring. Interesting, but I don't bother to verify.
I use Opera anyway.
I use about:mozilla. For every Mozilla or Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox/nom du jour release they have a different hidden start page when you type about:mozilla into the address bar. Firefox 0.8's: And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror. from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15 Coincidentally (i'm sure :P), if you type about:mozilla into IE's address bar, you get a full window blue color in the same hue as a BSOD :)
www.hanksgalleries.com
ballsome.com, my personal site.
I figure if I don't like looking at it every time I open a browser window, nobody else will.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Wish I could find the spyware that keeps doing that to me. :(
I use about:mozilla. For every Mozilla or Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox/nom du jour release they have a different hidden start page when you type about:mozilla into the address bar.
:P), if you type about:mozilla into IE's address bar, you get a full window blue color in the same hue as a BSOD :)
Firefox 0.8's:
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
Coincidentally (i'm sure
(Would a kind mod please mod that ill formatted post down? Thanks.)
That and typing
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The Wikipedia random page is great. Half the time it's a random town, other time it's random people, but then every few days it's something really cool that I never knew before.
Before that, it was news.google.com for a few months, and before that it was Slashdot for many years.
I run my own copy of rawdog with lots of custom scripts that pulls together all the blogs, news and comics i regularly read into a single page
I'm me. I think.
It's an online bookmark manager which means I can access my bookmarks from home, work, client sites, etc. without having to sync.
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
I sat down a while ago and laid out my own custom start page, it consists of a calendar/planner, my favorite headlines, some simple search forms, and the current stats on my router/render box. That way, I can get anything I might need to know from several different pieces of software all from firefox in about 2 or 3 seconds.
Text not found: pr0n
Okay, maybe they spelled it differently...
Text not found: porn
Holy shit. Nobody has thought of that yet. What is (not?) wrong with you folks?!??!?! this is slashdot, for crissake!
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
Slashdot, google, the in network veo camera that I use to look in on my son, and something else I don't want to name
I can click any of them to start there.. but if I click home, that's google.-- but, I have four start pages
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Another fireshark... spacecyote... etc. I love that plugin. I have /., drudgereport (it keeps me fair and balanced), yahoomail, GT, TZT, and WWS (last three being BBS). Oh yeah, and fark.
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
My home page is nothing. Since I have a Google seach field on my toolbar, having Google as a home page seemed needless.
My homepage is about:blank. It's been that way for a long time. Before that I used whatever good search engine was good at the time. It started with infoseek, then excite, altavista, hotbot, and finally google.
- you can see my sig but I can't.
Galeon opens in 9 workspaces, with seven tabs per workspace. (give or take a tab in a couple of them.)
News workpsace has MyYahoo, Slashdot, Linux Today, Google News, Cnn.com, CnetNews, and a local newspaper.
Four workspaces are for some "social" site or another. One workspace has a whole bunch of blank tabs that I can google directly into as needed, a couple of "My Portal" tabs built by Galeon, mostly for those once or twice a week or month sites.
That's just at home. Since it's linux, I don't need to reboot it often, so I don't worry too much about "launch" time.
At work, where I do worry a bit more about launch time, I have a custom page of work and personal relavent links that I update from time to time.
-Rusty
You never know...
Using Opera, it just restores my previous session. All the web pages I was looking at last time are brought back. My homepage, however, is www.AltaVista.com Some will say it's obsolete, but it's the only homepage I've had in my ~decade of browsing, and I see no need to change ::looks smug::
Inaccurate or no, it would be better that way.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
The most sensible site, Slashdot. If you don't know the URL, it's www.slashdot.org ;)
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
I guess it comes from when I got my first computer after using computer labs to create a stupid vanity fanboy page. When I got my own computer one of the first things I did when I got on the net for the first time was change my "home page" to my "home page." And for no real practical reason the practice stuck. I've long kept my bookmarks organized in dropdown menus off my toolbar (I'm now on Safari as my main browser so I've got a search field right there) and that's the way I like them.
Now that I'm aware of how useless a practice this is for me (except maybe I'll accidentally notice a spelling error or two every once in a while) maybe I'll finally change this practice.
Alex.
I use a custom home page. It contains forms for searches, web email, and whatever else I feel like putting there. The fact that it is world-accessible means I can use it from any terminal. The only problem is getting around to updating it.
Most login forms are convertible into a single text box for your password. Since I'm the only one who uses it, I can hardcode my username into a "type=hidden" input element. The submit button is also usually extraneous.
My wishlist now includes that Wikipedia random page idea and javascript email address obfuscation for forms where I login using my email address.
I have Opera set to display the pages that were open when Opera last closed... that way, my browsing sessions are endless. I do have a fixed home page, which is cesdep.org. I guess that counts as Personal and Customized.
Simon's Rock College
I tend to browse with lots of tabs. I want tabs to open quickly. Nothing loads faster than about:blank. If I want to visit a site often, I'll make a bookmark.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
http://10.254.254.250/
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.
A great source of new information about our universe and also a great source of potential desktop pictures.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Consisting of headlines taken from google news, and slashdot, as well as a few comic strips and forms to search several places.
my browser homepage still is file:///con/con
For the humor-impaired, the serious version:
I use a local HTML file with links to all the regularly visited sites, along with some forms for searching (google, everything2, freshmeat), some forms for logging in on various sites, and the weather report. Very handy.
Snarg.net Instead of being hammered with info overload right off the bat, Snarg offers a gradual way to get into right frame of mind - problem is, I sometimes forget why I fired up the browser in the 1st place.
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
I have a couple of wikis running, one of which is essentially a glorified bookmarking system. My browser start page is the HomePage of that wiki, which is just a list of other wiki pages, each devoted to some category of web sites (e.g. "NewsLinks").
-- $SIGNATURE
Yes, I know about Mozilla. Still too slow (even Firefox) and the XUL version of the Google toolbar has serious problems.
If you were about to tell me to switch to Linux, you really need to get a life.
But I digress. Why about:blank? Because there's absolute no web page I want to see every time I open a new browser window. Something I do 100 times a day. That's not hype -- 100 is a conservative estimate!
I like to pick up where I left off, so my start page is the set of tabs I was viewing when I last shut down the browser.
Using the Multizilla extension in Mozilla.
Opera: slashdot Mozilla: google IE: about:blank
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
I use Dave barry's blog as my start page.
local page with a link to /. and CyBear
(Score:0, Interesting)
The fact of the matter is that there isnt one single page. Think about it, in a normal day you code, read news, invest and have fun. How can one single page provide all these different perspective. You definitely would like to go to the source of each of categories.
I use the tabbed browsing feature of firefox. I have saved all the bookmanarks as "Daily starting points" tab.
This helps me to get the news / views I have been looking out for.
At home, it's my current search engine of choice: Google. this might change since I'm now using the Google Toolbar.
It used to be Excite and then Internet Movie Database (which I keep on a quick link button along with Slashdot, Fark, Dictionary.com).
The browsers I use on my FreeBSD box start with a blank page since I usually run them remotely (headless machine) and I don't want to waste time waiting for them.
At work, a custom made page with frames to our trouble ticket system as well as a couple of monitoring tools that give me an birds eye of view as to the general health of our systems.
No sig
For example, here's what I've got for Slashdot:
(excuse the space in the first <input>; it's Slashdot's, not mine.)
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
"Conquer your Desktop!" you insensitive clod!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Any of us could crank out a simple html page in no time at all but one of my good friends took his time and made a quality php page that is a fully customizable homepage for logged in users. I could not live without start.neverwake.net. It has all you need and it looks amazing too.
http://my.myway.com/
Basically a portal like yahoo, but more customizable. And their whole purpose is to run a site with no ads and no popups so that's a nice bonus.
I too use firefox to load up six different pages. Just scroll through to visit all my standard pages every morning:
Pooch Cafe Get Fuzzy Sluggy Freelance Megatokyo User Friendly Slashdot BYU
Then I usually go to cnn, nytimes, bbc, and deseret morning news for the second set of tabs. I love firefox
You can key a search directly from it, and that way I get a ten-second newsburst every time I start a browser.
I also have Google translation buttons on my corporate pages. Handy si usted sabe hablar solamente espanol (oder Deutscher).
They also get points for backing away from a public offering and the potential for all of that money in favour of doing things properly.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
here
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
My Linksys WET_11 Status page to tell me wether or not my leeched WiFi access is active :P
I hate Grammar Nazi's
It's been www.yahoo.com since Netscape 1.1N.
Anything else doesn't look right in the browser.
I don't actually use Yahoo for anything, but it's what Browsers Are Supposed To Have At Startup.
I set my browser home page to my bookmark page on my wiki server. It's somewhat combersome to add links to it, but I can use from any browser, and best of all, I can edit it from any browser.
Yup... DrudgeReport.com is a fairly good indicator of the general most-breaking news story of the moment, which is a good way to roll out of bed and start my morning.
:)
I'm damn sure that it's the start page of at least a third of DC.
Then, it's off to work where my start page is Google, even though there's an Intranet page I probably should be using instead.
Slashdot loads too slowly for a start page when I'm opening new windows. I used to keep it at Yahoo.com when I'd set up other people's computers because it was quick, moderately useful, and rather neutral.
Why not use a Big Brother or network status page as your start page? Simple, have the condensed view on your desktop permanently instead. It's an actual use for Windows' Active Desktop feature
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I love my start page. It's got a pretty picture of a feather, and says Seeing this instead of the website you expected? See for yourself: http://localhost/.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
only because I happen to work there. ;)
Very useful when making site updates.
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
That is the best idea ever.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Why load a page if I'm going to ignore it anyways?
I'm either using google (in my toolbar), or I know where I'm going.
my RSS reader takes care of the news now, so I don't have a need for my yahoo anymore. Although, I still prefer its format over the email style window.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Try about:config
Why? Two reasons.
One, google is simple and on a screamin fast pipe. If google doesn't load when I open my browser, I know my network or ISP is broken.
Secondly, each time I open a new window, its set to load my homepage (google). So all I need to do is gesture up (All-in-one Gestures extension) to open a new window, and bam: I'm ready to search da intarnet. With gestures, its even faster than having google in the menu bar (which I don't really like anyways). You don't have to click on anything, since the cursor defaults to googles search line... so a quick flick of the wrist upwards, anywhere on the screen, and i'm in business. Its wonderful.
That random wikipedia link is pretty cool though... maybe i'll add a second homepage to Firefox here...
Mine's got nekkid people all over. Really though it's just a big dynamic page that gathers a wealth of information about the various paysites I operate. How big will my commission check be this month ? blue box 3rd cell from the top. What's the trend for new memberships per day ? Graph in the bottom left corner.
Oh, and I have a google strip that hovers over all that, because y'know, you always need to google something.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I have ESPN.com as my start page. In a way, it is to sports fans what Slashdot is to geeks.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
What could be better than a page where you learn a little tidbit about the universe every day and usually see a new pretty picture?
The Astronomy Picture of the Day has been my default Home Page since I started checking it in 1995.
-- Eli Juicy Jones
Mine is a semi-local page. I live in a university dorm of sorts, and every one of the about 400 computers this site of our central switch can be considered semi-local: Connection speeds of 95 MBit/s, for real. Now, there happens to exist a traffic limit: We are only allowed 3 Gigs of internet traffic per month. The bean counter that ensures this is an old K6 called "KGB". It also shows off some nifty stats how traffic has developed over the last day, week, month, year. As such, its an important page which can contain some curious information as well, and which loads instantly. The latter is what keeps me from using www.google.de, as that usually takes 1s or so.
Divide et impera!
At work, I use the city I am working in. At home, I use the city I am at. I like viewing the weather information. My father uses news.google.com. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Start pages are used by people who complain their internet is slow. Small office with a dozen or so people sharing a DSL all using start pages and complaining it is slow. DUH.
Don't they realize that every time they open a window with a start page, wich 99% of the time they don't want, they waste network resources? Sure with proper caching and proxy it wouldn't matter to much but that is of course never the case.
Start page? Never used it as soon as I learned how to disable it years ago in netscape days.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This page is my start page, and is pretty much generated by one of seven shell scripts depending on what day it is at 05:00 EST. Simple HTML to load a series of links and that's it, so I can go read my comics in peace.
This sig no verb.
I don't have a start page. In Konq, it opens up all my tabs from the last time I logged out. So I guess my start page is all the pages I last visited before a logout.
Ban Reality TV!
with lots of hidden functionality.
blanketfort.com - exit/home
.
. hmmm
For my daily dose of humor.
You're old school? I beta tested the motherf***ing abacus!
I created a php page that I run on localhost apache server. Here is a sample of what the page looks like (the actual appointments, names, birthdays, etc have been changed). It allows me to write what I have to do and save it. Also, what I write in the appointment textbox is read in by the calendar part so the dates are underlined and a tooltip tells me what I have to do (needed when the texbox is full since I don't like to delete record of what I've done either).
I tend to forget to stay organized, so I do it for a while and then have lapses. On MS Windows, I have this as my desktop as well with Active Desktop. On GNU/Linux, I don't know how to do that so it's just my homepage on my browsers. (I might try to do it with superkaramba.) Though, this can't motivate me to stay organized, the constant reminder has been helpful for me.
on a side note, the page looks much better in Mozilla, Opera and MSIE than Konqueror. KHTML doesn't seem to be able to have backgrounds on textboxes, and there are other issues with it in terms of aesthetics.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
... running an Apache 1.3.something, serving a hand-written (S)HTML page containing the most frequently used pages and some CGIs for various stuff, mostly converting POD, man, info and so on; both at home and in the office.
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
...though since I almost never close Mozilla, it doesn't really matter. What I really like is having a group of tabs associated with the "Home" bookmark. At the moment, one click opens up: /., explodingdog, maddox, the LP's homepage, wikipedia, suprnova, where's george?, and google news. These are all the pages I view at least daily, so I like having them at my fingertips.
live(free) || die;
come off it, thats for normals
My home page is the custom script that displays the various status of my servers
I've got
My browser very rarely gets closed as I have it on a vnc session
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I set it to a local "news" directory where I download news HTML pages during the day so that I can read them in the evening when I'm not at work. Before that I used either google.com or about:blank. Both are fast enough to start up (though compared to how slowly Mozilla starts up, it hardly matters...), but I often use my laptop offline.
Well, duh.
My mother's is MadBlast, my brother's is some magic tricks site and mine is Slashdot. Which is funny, because I seem to be visiting CNN more than Slashdot these days. I usually have a scroll through the stories and then go onto CNN and the BBC.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
The Hunger Site : Give Food for Free to Hungry People in the World
My homepage is a script I wrote that displays:
1) Natalie Portman in the background
2) Birthdays of friends within the next 7 days
3) Some often needed local links
4) Apache and PHP Version
5) A random quote
I once had a tail of the Apache error log displayed there, too. And there once was a notification about things I want to see in TV.
When I press
I'm taken to a local page with links to handy bookmarks.But when I open the browser[1] my default session opens three separate windows with several pages each:
- Work stuff: internal DBs, references, etc.
- Dailies: comics, news sites and blogs I follow and similar
- Current: "notes-to-self", pages I'm working with right now, etc.
[1] Opera. Does it with no need for pesky add-ons, and does it better too.The knuckles, the horrible knuckles!
(I'm a girl, you know)
I keep Dictionary.com's Word of the Day as my home page. How else would I learn how to mock the ignorant without them knowing it?
I use some page on my (yes, "dying")OpenBSD / Apache box, a few feet away from my PCs. Either a Links page (with SlashDot near the top!), or a "fortune" page for a bit of randomness each time.
A local page is handy, as it loads quickly. Using a Web page instead of a local file gives me a consistent, updated page on all local machines (my devel box, my wife's PC, my SQL Server test box, etc.). Periodically move frequently-used local bookmarks into the server's Links page, and I have my links on any local machine.
A small bit of SSI in an otherwise static page allows you to serve additional, not-publicly-visible links to machines on your local network. No, not for hiding porn, just hiding links to devel boxes that aren't publicly accessible.
My browser homepage is set to "http://localhost/dwww", which is mapped to the web-based Debian documentation package. My system's docs in all formats (HTML, man pages, Info manuals) are just a click or two away.
-Stephen
Counting down....
http://www.eclecticpixel.com/bonnaroo/
(check out http://www.bonnaroo.com)
reech bee-yond ur clip-0n
When I bought my trackball**KENSINGTON EXPERT MOUSE PRO** the six *Easy Launch* buttons were just
part of the package rather than any real plus. Now that I've lived with them for a couple of years,
I feel lost when I can't use them.
The #1 button is my ISP
The #2 button is Slashdot
The #6 is my banking/brokerage
and the other three I change fairly often.
The SECOND biggest bene of this is that it works regardless of browser, without my having
to remember a damn thing.
Thelma, I'm not making ANY deals.
At home, it's /web/tvb/[not-telling].html, a page with links to my regular sites and often-used resources like Google, IMDB, etc. That directory is an alias to one of the virtual hosts my web server, so I can sit down at any machine on the net with a browser, type in toddverbeek.com/[not-telling].html, and be "at home". Granted, it's not especially secure, which is why I'm not divulging the actual filename and I make a habit of purging the URL history when using other people's machines. But it's not like I have links to boy-porn or disloyal-to-the-president sites on it... and it's darn handy.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
goatse.cx
It's the first page I get to see every morning. And I can start the day knowing that nothing more traumatic can happen.
Either this or I follow Lynda Jensen's advice and eat a live toad.
I have my start page set to a local HTML file with about 20 of my most-used search forms. I can search dictionaries, translate text and web pages, look up movies at Rotten Tomatoes, and look up maps, all from a local HTML file. This saves quite a bit of typing. Of course, there are plenty of bookmarks, too.
It's a local HTML file, but I also have a copy of it on the web (linked above) for when I'm using someone else's machine.
Well, my start page is nil (not to be confused with about:blank). My home page, of course, is /.
I usually launch my web browser like .
$ lynx
If it has to be a graphical one, such as
this Internet Exploder at work, I prefer
a blank page, because it loads fastest.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
I never shut down my browser, you insensitive clod!
I set my browser to load up Amphetadesk. Nothing like getting some blogs read on initial startup. I can do a quick glance and see if there are any headlines on the first couple of sources while I am typing in the URL for the next page.
--- Biffster.org
"Bite my shiny metal ass."
Loads faster, fully customisable, and if your browser is also your file manager (eg konqueror) you can use it to launch all sorts of local stuff seamlessly from the same page that you use for external links.
Actually, my local index.html shows the firewall webpage in one frame, and all the other stuff in another frame.
If your set-up requires you to initiate an internet connection (eg dial-up) and you use a firewall (eg ipcop, smoothwall) then it makes sense for your "home" page to point to your firewall's "connect/disconnect" page.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
I load up my phpToDo page, always see my important todo stuff before doing anything else. Has worked for me for years.
Seems to work quite well ... The flat file page also syncs any updates across to several other copies on different ISP's so I can definately get to it anywhere in the world.