I recently started using my own home page in Firefox as a start-point for all the important links that I should visit from time to time. It’s been a good boost for productivity since it keeps the main thing the main thing:

This was just a simple ‘idealet’ inspired by Opera’s Speed Dial feature.

The advantages to using this are:

1. Quick access to things you need to access like your website management page or your bank website, instead of hunting around in the bookmarks menu.
2. Avoids the need for a bookmarks toolbar. I feel a toolbar takes too much screen real-estate compared to its usefulness.
3. When you’re bored, you open your homepage and visit some of the vast websites where you can learn stuff, like the ones under the ‘Grey Matter’ section.
4. It jogs your memory to visit some of the websites that you should visit from time to time, like any forums that you want to be updated on (instead of letting them flood your inbox).
5. Having a simple local HTML page as the homepage is much faster than an online start-page.
6. Backing up/restoring/editing a HTML file is simpler than a bookmarks database.

The only thing missing is that when I open a new tab, it should automatically open with the home page instead of a blank page. This can be done using the Tabbrowser Preferences add-on.

Update: Or you can simply use the many Speed Dial addons to Firefox out there…

Please rate whether you liked this article:

Posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 2:17 pm.
Filed under categories: Productivity, Tech, Web.
.