Windows on the Web: Looking for Real Estate?

By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster

Real estate has a saying that the three most important factors are location, location, and location. It’s the same in the online world, but it’s the location of your homepage that matters.

The homepage is the default page your browser goes to when you first boot it up. It is a page that we see many times a day, making it a valuable piece of online real estate. That’s why Microsoft always sets the default home page for Internet Explorer to its own Microsoft Network. (A cynic may say that the only people who use MSN are the ones who don’t know how to reset their homepage.)

Some people set their homepage to their favorite news source, such as the newyorktimes.com, foxnews.com, or espn.com. Others use a portal, which allows you to mix and match content from a variety of sources. After many years of using a My Yahoo home page, I’ve recently switched to a personalized Google homepage.

Why Google?

There were a number of reasons for the switch, over and above the boredom of seeing the same homepage for a couple of years. First, I’ve started using more and more of Google’s other free services, such a Gmail as my primary backup email system. They can be integrated into your Google home page. Second is a more flexible layout, although this is probably a matter of personal preference. Third, none of the screen real estate is devoted to ads. Last, a couple of the services that I really liked at My Yahoo seemed to be broken half the time.

Google home pages are free, so you can always try them out to see if you like them. Go here to find out how to set one up. While you can do it without a free Google account, it won’t hurt to sign up for one of those, and a free Gmail account, too. (Why would you want another e-mail account? I use the Gmail account for all the various newsletters I sign up to receive, to keep down the clutter in my main email account. It may also be handy as a backup, if your regular e-mail account goes down. Also, if you have an email address tied to something else – such as a job, or a particular ISP – this one can serve as a permanent address.)

What’s on the Page?

Once you have a page or pages set up, what can you put on it? You’ll notice a link called “Add Stuff” on the upper right hand side of the page. Click it, and it will take you to a page where Google has lots of pre-packaged material, that they call gadgets, sorted into categories. The Finance page include news feeds from sources such as the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg and Yahoo, currency converters, stock charts, and the like.

You aren’t limited to what Google provides. Any RSS news feed can be added if you click the “Add by URL” link. For instance, if you want to add the NABE Headline feed to your page, click “Add by URL” and then enter http://www.nabe.com/nabe.xml. Most blogs have the feed listed somewhere on their page, as do most news sites. The screenshot below shows some of the content on the Econ tab of my home page.

Once you have content added to the page, you can click and drag it around to bring your favorites to the top or move something to another tab. If the item is a headline feed, click the edit button to show how many items you want to display on the page.

And Finally…

The NABE website is getting more and more inbound traffic from Wikipedia. We are mentioned in at least one article about 9/11, and we are referenced in a number of articles about economists.

However, there is no article about NABE itself. This being Wikipedia, we can do something about it. I’ll be starting an article about NABE, with a little bit about the founding of NABE and its activities today. This being Wikipedia, everyone can help. Anyone who wants to contribute to the article, please go to Wikipedia and add your two cents worth. (Or four or six cents.) Anyone who was around in the early days is especially welcome.