Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with homepage

Take This Homepage & Shove It

MaxVonCretin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:13:29 -0800

"Set As Homepage" - I have a client who is obsessed with the notion of adding a "Set As Homepage" text link or button to the header of their website - you know, like everyone used to do circa '02. Now setting aside for a moment how worthlessly moronic that may be, I am curious, do any current browsers even permit that kind of javascript anymore - like from a security standpoint? Is it a moot point? (Hoping so)

Firefox: start page vs. home page

DevilsAdvocate — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:13:50 -0800

Firefox: different start page than home page? I'm a relatively recent convert to Firefox 3, from Maxthon. Mostly I like it, but there's one feature of Maxthon I liked that I haven't been able to replicate in Firefox. I'd like to have a fixed start page (the page that comes up when you first open Firefox) that's different from the home page (the page you get when you click the Home icon). This was possible in Maxthon. Is there a Firefox plugin which allows this?

Set as homepage?

signal — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:43:14 -0800

Is there a way to include a "Set as your homepage" link in a web page nowadays? Cross browser/platform is nice, but Windows IE 6 & 7 would suffice.

Need an alternative to MyHQ for my homepage(s).

iamkimiam — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:30:17 -0800

Need to find an alternative to MyHQ.com. MyHQ is a web-based homepage that is simply lists of links that you can add to, customize, and organize into categories. You set it as your homepage, and voila!, every place you regularly visit on the internet is right in front of you. Their site is currently down, which has happened before, but this time I fear its for reals. I am literally lost without it (not to mention the 100+ organized links that I no longer have access to). This is different from social bookmarking (please do not recommend delicious.com; its a wonderful site, but won't suffice for this purpose). This would be like if you had access to your computer's bookmarks list as a homepage, from any computer, anywhere. There has GOT to be another website that is comparable to MyHQ. Anybody know what that is?

Thanks. I'm staring at the blank browser window and am completely clueless without my handy homepage! (I actually had to TYPE "ask.metafilter.com" into the URL bar...oh, the horror!)

Looking for wikis with well-designed front pages

electric_counterpoint — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:27:22 -0800

I'm looking to revamp my organization's wiki. Have you seen a Mediawiki installation with a really well-designed front page? Right now, our wiki's front page is just a selection of internal links in a few categories, making for a long, uninviting, single column wall 'o' letters. I'd like to class it up a bit, especially since it's public-facing with a high PageRank — users who landed on one of our deep pages via Google and clicked up to ../Main_Page would thus recognize that they're looking at a big, unified wiki resource.

Obviously, Wikipedia's front page is the gold standard for a Mediawiki homepage (or at least it's the most recognized). Of course, we don't have as much daily activity, so it wouldn't make sense for us to put as much dynamic content on the front page. I guess I'm just looking for examples of well-designed front pages that display a relatively stable introduction to the wiki's relatively stable content.

If it helps, we've got some "current events" pages, a lot of "how to's," an awful lot of entries for individual members of a particular group, and some administrivia like meeting minutes.

Industry specific news service feed

curiousleo — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:12:08 -0800

I need to create a company website. Are there custom news bulletin that can be updated automatically so only industry relevant info are displayed? I am total newbie on web building. I noticed some other company websites have industry specific news bulletins shown on there homepages. Where do i need to go for such service? how much does it usully cost?

I figured since the company site is not planning on updating homepages too often, that such news serivce may add some freshness to the homepage i am trying to build.

What is RSS feed? is that what i am look for?

Tonight I'm gonna blog like it's 1993

Kadin2048 — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:26:02 -0800

What blog/CMS software would you recommend that doesn't rely on MySQL or another database backend? So, I finally broke down and bought a vanity domain for myself, and I want to set up a small site there, just to provide occasional updates to my friends and family, and maybe host some other content that I want to share. It's nothing big, I don't expect much/any traffic, and I'm not looking to make money off of it.

I decided to go with Nearly Free Speech for hosting, because they offer a nice metered plan that only charges me for the bandwidth that I actually use, which is cool. But they (quite reasonably) charge extra for SQL processes. So I'd like to find some sort of simple CMS that doesn't require a database to run. PHP4 and CGI (all major languages incl. Perl, Python, Ruby) are both OK.

The only things that have turned up so far are FlatPress, which is a sort of WordPress clone that uses flat files, and Simple PHP Blog. Are there other packages that I'm missing? Has anyone ever used either one? How bad are they to set up? FlatPress seems a little light on documentation...at least compared to regular WordPress, which has a lot of 'Howto'-style documentation because everyone and their cousin seems to use it.

This question last August was about alternatives to popular blog packages that don't require complex coding, but I'm less concerned with that than I am in just avoiding SQL completely.

I don't care about anything very fancy, like the ability to use plugins or customize the style very much. I just want a way of throwing content up onto the site, without having to maintain, organize, and edit a lot of static HTML files. I don't really even care about comments, although they're a plus.

Maybe what I'm looking for really isn't "blog" software. Really, I just want some sort of management system, that avoids the static-HTML morass that I dread from my early-90s experiments with personal web sites. (I used to manage things by keeping a local mirror of the site, adding my content by hand, and then using an FTP client to sync the server's copy. It worked OK, but I want to be able to update from the road, without being tied to the machine with the local mirror.)

Anyway, I'm open to any suggestions, experiences, or anecdotes that folks would like to give.

Trouble with Firefox

NorthCoastCafe — Mon, 28 May 2007 07:04:27 -0800

I love my homepage JournalistExpress.com which I have used for years. All of a sudden loading it with Firefox has become frustratingly long. 3,4,5 minutes sometimes. The help desk at JouralistExpress told me there is a known problem with Firefox and gave some suggested adjustments to settings all of which I made. No difference. Here's what they told me was the problem. There is a known Firefox issue with IPv6. IPv6 was designed in part to solve the problem IPv4 will soon be facing: the exhaustion of all possible IP addresses. Firefox implemented IPv6 support in early 2000, but that support did not receive widespread testing until recently as IPv6-capable OSs and network software/equipment became more common. One particular bug occurs when an IPv6-capable DNS servers returns an IPv4 address when Firefox expects an IPv6 address. It is possible for Firefox to recover from this confusion, but a significant delay is introduced while Firefox tries to reach the site at what is essentially the wrong IP address. I believe this is the delay you are encountering. Even though Firefox states it is waiting for Journalist Express, it is using the unexpected IPv4 IP address as an IPv6 IP address and, in essence, is looking in the wrong place. Once it recovers, it eventually uses the correct IP address.

I admit I don't understand it. I find no forum on Firefox's site that addresses this problem. Before I abandon JournalistExpress I wonder if anyone can point me to a help source where I might fix the problem. TIA !

How to dynamically update webpage

extrabox — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:49:15 -0800

I am designing a homepage, that will be a central navigation point for several blogs that I have. I would like this homepage to display the jpeg photos that accompany my most recent blog posts ... and I would like this to update automatically; i.e., if I do a new post on one of the blogs, my homepage automatically updates to show the jpeg that accompanies that new posting.

I really don't even know how to search for this question, so forgive me if it has been asked before.

If there is an online tutorial to accomplishing this, that would be great.

(I'm also curious about the best way to accomplish the same thing with text...i.e. the homepage would display some portion of text that has been updated at another site.)

Thanks!

Display my blog entries on another site?

electric_counterpoint — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:54:43 -0800

Quick-n-dirty way to put a "teaser" latest blog entry on my homepage? The facts: I've got a blog and a more static "homepage." They're separate, totally different designs. Someday they'll be hosted together on the same server under the same domain, but until then they don't even know one another exists. The blog is powered by Blogger and hosted on their Blogspot.

I'd like to show my latest blog post as a teaser on the front page of my personal website, in an iframe. Ideally it would even have a word limit -- maybe the first 100 words and then an ellipsis and link to the actual blog.

I can't figure out how to make it happen, though.

Things I've considered:
- Adding it as live RSS content. Since I own both sites, it ought to be easy. Unfortunately, I can't find a free RSS parser that will allow me to do it without having my server up. The server won't be up for a while for reasons I can't control... and I don't want to pay $50 for a parser license, only to junk it once my server comes online and I can do it for free with server-side stuff.

- Somehow putting the standard Blogger tags into my homepage (or iframe) and actually publishing each entry both places. Not actually sure how I could do this -- is there an automated way to do it? Would I have to cut and paste each entry into two separate posts in two separate Blogger accounts?

There should be an easy way to do this, since I'm dealing exclusively with my content (sites and feeds). But, I've been putting this off for the duration of the time it's taken to build the sites, and now I've got a glaring white space on my homepage that I'd rather not show off to the world. Thanks in advance for your ideas!

Removing about: blank

DeepFriedTwinkies — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 08:57:36 -0800

My computer has been jacked by the about: blank bug. I have run Hijack This and removed the offending sites but apparently this one automatically regenerates. Anyone have an idea how to remove this? I have Windows ME (please don't laugh-it was on sale).

One-stop homepage for all my current projects?

grefo — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 11:36:25 -0800

I'm looking for an application or web page that I can use as a start page when I get to work in the morning. Ideally, it should have current projects, documenation, links, etc. What would this "something" be called and does it exist?