I recently started using my own home page in Firefox as a start-point
for all the important links that I should visit from time to time.
It’s been a good boost for productivity since it keeps the main
thing the main thing:
This was just a simple ‘idealet’ inspired by Opera’s Speed
Dial feature.
The advantages to using this are:
- Quick access to things you need to access like your website
management page or your bank website, instead of hunting around in
the bookmarks menu. - Avoids the need for a bookmarks toolbar. I feel a toolbar takes too
much screen real-estate compared to its usefulness. - When you’re bored, you open your homepage and visit some of the
vast websites where you can learn stuff, like the ones under the
‘Grey Matter’ section. - It jogs your memory to visit some of the websites that you should
visit from time to time, like any forums that you want to be
updated on (instead of letting them flood your inbox). - Having a simple local HTML page as the homepage is much faster than
an online start-page. - Backing up/restoring/editing a HTML file is simpler than
a bookmarks database.
The only thing missing is that when I open a new tab, it should This can
automatically open with the home page instead of a blank page.
be done using the Tabbrowser Preferences add-on.
Update: Or you can simply use the many Speed Dial addons to Firefox out there…
A local tiddlywiki would be great in this situation. I still prefer Google home page and bookmarks toolbar though.. realestate on 24 inch and bandwidth on comcast is not an issue :)
@Sridhar: Yes, Tiddlywiki is a good idea but I think it’s too advanced for my purposes… And if you have a 24″ screen, there’s nothing much left to say ;-)
One nifty trick is to keep some sites in a Bookmark Folder and do an “Open All Tabs”. For me, an example tab is “Slashdot|Engadget|Gizmodo|…”