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Tech Tips Articles » Customize Your Web Experience |
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Customize Your Web Experience (Feb 13, 2006)
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Let’s face it, the Internet is huge. In fact, it is so massive that if you do a Google.com search for ‘Jackson, Kentucky’ you’ll see that Google can find 34,500,000 web pages that have something to do with our little hometown. And that’s just for lil’ old Jackson. Imagine what’s out there for New York City… Now, of course there aren’t 34.5 million websites dedicated to Jackson, just that many pages where you can find some little bit of (perhaps useless) information about it. I don’t know about you, but I certainly do not have enough free time to scour all the information on the Internet to find what I am looking for. I am usually searching for a particular item like current news, weather, sports scores, a phone number, etc. And this week, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I usually find the things I most commonly need without searching for anything. By looking at a single webpage I see the current weather, national news, state news, local news, my to-do calendar, and much more.
What’s that you say? You would love to find out how I do this? How much would you pay to be able to open up a browser and instantly see the current weather, latest national/state/local news, your horoscope, the latest movie releases, and other interesting stuff? Would you pay $100? $50? $25? Well, friends, this week you can get in on this exciting offer to find all this and more for the one-time price of nothing. That’s right; you can simply sign up for a free account at Yahoo.com and get a personalized page where you can instantly see whatever information you want. Too good to be true, you say? Well, read on.
Just go to Yahoo.com and click on the ‘My Yahoo’ link. You will then need to sign up for a free Yahoo account. From there, you can simply edit your My Yahoo page to show whatever you want to see. There are a number of pre-built modules you can add to your page to make it truly customized to your tastes. If you use a free Yahoo email account, you can even set it up so that your emails are shown on the page as well. You can also customize this page with different backgrounds and even add other customized pages. Whenever you want to see your page, just go to my.yahoo.com.
To make things even easier, you can set your My Yahoo page to be the default page that your browser opens when you connect to the Internet (Internet Explorer users click Tools Internet Options General and set the homepage to my.yahoo.com. Firefox users click Tools Options General and set the homepage to my.yahoo.com).
If you want to see local news for Jackson and Breathitt County on your customized page, please email me at the address below. You’ll need to add a link to something called an RSS feed I wrote to show local news. It’s easy, and also free, but would take up too much space to describe in this article.
Now, for the Cool Site of the Week... This week’s site is the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine at archive.org. I absolutely love this site. You can type in any web address and click the ‘Take Me Back’ button to see what a web page used to look like. With this tool, you can see what Microsoft.com looked like back in 1996, what CNN’s website showed in 2000 or what JacksonKentucky.com had on its page in 2001. It may not be very useful, but it certainly is fun.
As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for future articles, please email me at mike@MikeBryant.com.
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