As noted elsewhere this week, the eminent American essayist George Scialabba has recently taken his work online with GeorgeScialabba.net.
But that’s just the beginning. He’s on a roll.
Like many people, George says he has Arts and Letters Daily as his homepage. But (like just as many, I bet) he sometimes wonders if that is quite as good an idea as it once seemed. Just how many “those crazy environmentalists/feminists/PCers/structuralists/ poststructuralists/postmodernists/post-postmodernists sure are crazy!” articles do you really need to read in a given month? There is such a thing as oversaturating a point, after all.
Not content (like some of us) merely to grumble, George asks a question that I post here now with his permission:
“If the techies are so smart, why haven’t they figured out how to have a rotating home page feature that will open to a different page every day of the week, so one is sure of seeing one’s favorite sites at least once a week?”
This is a great idea, and I only think it is fair that whoever among you goes and develops it ought to throw a couple million bucks his way in gratitude.
{ 15 comments }
Kieran Healy 04.21.07 at 6:35 pm
Here you go. Where’s my check?
This is also kind of what RSS Readers are for.
Scott McLemee 04.21.07 at 6:49 pm
Well, sure. But the percentage of RSS users among people online is pretty small — and besides, not everything that one might want as a homepage has a feed.
Thanks for the tip though.
KCinDC 04.21.07 at 6:51 pm
Who cares about the home page? Are people constantly rebooting? How often do you start your browser?
Kelly 04.21.07 at 7:25 pm
Huh, that homepage randomizer is really neat, Kieran.
moriarty 04.21.07 at 8:50 pm
Who cares about the home page? Are people constantly rebooting? How often do you start your browser.
I re-start my browser for every online session. What do other people do?
Hermenauta 04.21.07 at 9:12 pm
Isn’t Netvibes enough to you, guys?
Dave Menendez 04.21.07 at 9:31 pm
I’ve never really understood the home page idea. When I open a new window, it’s because I want to see a specific page. If I didn’t have my browser set to display a blank page in new windows, it would just waste its time loading an irrelevant page.
Stuart 04.21.07 at 9:42 pm
I have never understood why people wouldn’t have a home page, seeing as you don’t have to wait for a page to finish loading to select another one, so not having one just makes you have to click a few more times each time you want to go to the page you use/read most often.
vivian 04.22.07 at 12:31 am
I close my browser when I want to get work done for a while. Sites I go to daily (or weekly) are in the history, and autocomplete after very few keystrokes. When I want to surf wider, I go to a likely site, like this one (or Making Light, or others) and use the blogroll/sidelights/particles. Favorites, even.
How can people who write/blog so much be afraid of typing so little?
Bloix 04.22.07 at 12:46 am
I stopped reading A&L Daily after the third or fourth “Nature and Science are in a conspiracy to suppress the truth that global warming is a hoax” article.
almostinfamous 04.22.07 at 5:55 am
on a mac, you never have to quit an app. just hide it and come back later. why would you quit an app?
sanbikinoraion 04.22.07 at 12:33 pm
Between Firefox and my kickass Logitech keyboard (and no, this isn’t viral advertising), when I first open a browser I get my homepage, which is useful. When I press ctrl+T I get a new empty tab. If I want to just go straight to a particular website, I can push the “go” button on my keyboard, which will take me straight there. So it’s possible to have one’s virtual cake and eat it.
Kenny Easwaran 04.22.07 at 10:11 pm
I have never understood why people wouldn’t have a home page, seeing as you don’t have to wait for a page to finish loading to select another one
But it does slow things down for a moment. And, despite using a mac (contra #11), Firefox sometimes seems to get into a funny mood where it takes ten seconds between every action (probably because I’ve got about 15 tabs open at the time but who knows). So not having to load a page is nice.
Actually, the real reason I don’t use a homepage is because I have the session saver Firefox extension, which restarts Firefox with the collection of tabs open that it had last time I was using it.
Pete 04.23.07 at 1:15 pm
I keep my browser open for weeks at a time, and open pages in tabs by preference. What would I want a homepage for? The nearest thing I use is “bookmark this group of tabs”.
John Mark Ockerbloom 04.24.07 at 1:28 pm
Closing a browser now and again is useful for:
— Clearing out any excess in-memory cache or memory leaks (yes, browsers still leak memory a bit, more so often if you have extensions)
— Making sure security patches take (my browser, Firefox, auto-loads security patches, but they don’t take efect until it restarts)
— Clearing out cookies (my browser has a “clear cookies on restart” option, which is simpler than going through the menus and dialogs every time I want to clear them. It’s useful to clear them if you want to make it harder for sites to compile a long-term history of what you do online. Cookies that last while a browser session does are sufficient for most e-commerce-type activities.)
— Forcing me to stop surfing the Web and get some work done.
That’s good enough for me.
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