Okay….I am hooked on this thing already.

In the 10 years I have been working on the web, I have only had 3 different home pages for any substantial length of time. In order…..Yahoo!, MSNBC, Google, back to MSNBC. I have always liked reading Internet based news and so MSNBC so far holds the record at close to 5 of the 10 years as my home page. I read other sites but I liked the format of MSNBC so I kept it and branched out from there.

Start is my new home page.

Start accepts RSS feeds so now I am able to add and organize a bunch of feeds the way I like them on a web page that I can access from anywhere. I can also add weather, stock quotes, and a few other goodies from a canned menu provided by Start. I have just spent the last hour or so adding feeds and organizing it the way I like it.

huh? an hour?

Yeah…..I have never been much of a blogger and as a result, not much of a blog reader. So I decided I needed to expand my horizons at the same time I was configuring my Start site. As I searched for some blogs I wanted to add I ended up reading some of them and it took me longer than expected to get my page set up.

I have no idea how long it would takle some one who has a bazillion feeds they read to get setup. I just figured after an hour I needed a break from reading and I wanted to post about what I had stumbled on so far.

I like the Start site. Simple, clean, easy to set up, drag and drop enabled for organizing and a couple of themes so I have some control over look. The coolerest (yeah….coolerest!) thing is being able to shrink down the sumary of the feeds, close the page, re-open and they are still shrunk. I can cram a BUNCH of feeds on the page and expand/collapse as needed.

It does have a few quirks though…..

I had to delete my cookies to get the page to reset after I hosed it all up while playing around. No big deal really as I needed to get the crumbs out of my system anyway.

I can add stock quotes and weather sites but I can’t find a way to remove any I don’t want any longer.

It seems a little plain after having MSNBC for such a long time and seeing pictures on a home page. Yeah….I am all about the pictures (now that I typed that, does Playboy have an RSS feed?……well, yes….they do…..). Maybe let me lick to a URL based pick so i can decorate my site some (no….not Playboy)

Check out Start when you get a chance. I think you will like it.

Cheers!