Portal Pages and You
If you are at all like me you probably try to keep up with a variety of Web sites. Some of these sites are for professional content, some of them are personal. All of them are interesting to you. Perhaps you have many of these pages setup as bookmarks or favorites in your Web browser. This works pretty well, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to go to one page and get a glimpse into the content that was available on all of your favorite pages at once? This is where the portal page comes to the rescue! There are many examples of this kind of service but I will present three that I like and use.
All of these services have some things in common. They make it very easy to setup and organize custom pages that contain the headlines from many of your favorite Web pages. For example, if you happen to be a news junkie you probably like to check in on the CNN Web page during the day. Using a portal page you can "subscribe" to the RSS feed that contains the headlines from CNN. This allows for a very simple view of the content that is on the page without actually going to the site. If you see something you want to read more about you can simply click through and be taken to the story on the CNN site.
RSS stands for real simple syndication. This is a way in which you can subscribe to content found on web sites or blogs. How do you know you can subscribe to a Web site? Look for this symbol:
This is the most common icon to represent an RSS feed. A typical RSS link will look a little bit different than a regular URL. For example, here is an RSS feed for USA Today's headlines: http://asp.usatoday.com/marketing/rss/rsstrans.aspx?feedId=news1 Often times if you go to a site you can very often find buttons for different portal services that the site has already configured to quickly add their RSS feed to your portal page. My blog page has some examples of these buttons.
Once you have collected some of your favorite sites RSS feeds it is time to organize them. All of the sites I have mentioned go about this in a similar fashion. You are able to create tabs and then have boxes or sections in columns on that page. Next, you can move those boxes around in order to arrange your contents any way that suits you. You can then create multiple tabs to create pages by subject. On my netvibes page I have a tab for technology sites, a tab for College of Lake County blogs, and a tab for personal sites. I can switch from tab to tab very easily. It puts an hour of Web browsing into a minute of time. In addition, all of these portal sites also include widgets. This could be weather, games, your del.icio.us bookmarks. Perhaps you have a Picasa Web album you would want to have rotating on your portal page. No problem. Interested in a search box that simultaneously searches Google, Yahoo, and MSN? Done. The possibilities are endless.
Your new home page is waiting, so give one of these portal pages a try today!
All of these services have some things in common. They make it very easy to setup and organize custom pages that contain the headlines from many of your favorite Web pages. For example, if you happen to be a news junkie you probably like to check in on the CNN Web page during the day. Using a portal page you can "subscribe" to the RSS feed that contains the headlines from CNN. This allows for a very simple view of the content that is on the page without actually going to the site. If you see something you want to read more about you can simply click through and be taken to the story on the CNN site.
RSS stands for real simple syndication. This is a way in which you can subscribe to content found on web sites or blogs. How do you know you can subscribe to a Web site? Look for this symbol:
Once you have collected some of your favorite sites RSS feeds it is time to organize them. All of the sites I have mentioned go about this in a similar fashion. You are able to create tabs and then have boxes or sections in columns on that page. Next, you can move those boxes around in order to arrange your contents any way that suits you. You can then create multiple tabs to create pages by subject. On my netvibes page I have a tab for technology sites, a tab for College of Lake County blogs, and a tab for personal sites. I can switch from tab to tab very easily. It puts an hour of Web browsing into a minute of time. In addition, all of these portal sites also include widgets. This could be weather, games, your del.icio.us bookmarks. Perhaps you have a Picasa Web album you would want to have rotating on your portal page. No problem. Interested in a search box that simultaneously searches Google, Yahoo, and MSN? Done. The possibilities are endless.
Your new home page is waiting, so give one of these portal pages a try today!
posted by Scott Rial @ 2:51 PM
1 Comments:
At 10/2/08 12:14 AM ,
Tonya Howe said...
Great Article!
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