Lately, I find myself missing the dynamic start pages we used to set for our browsers in the late 1990s. The ones I liked eventually turned into search engines, got crapped up by ads, or just plain went away. All of the above, in many cases. For a while, I didn’t miss them, because feed readers and synchronized bookmarks kind of took their place, for the most part. But now I find myself wanting to go back to that, because feed readers and synchronized bookmarks don’t work the way I want them to anymore. So maybe it’s worth building something new that works just how I want.

And since I’ve, once again, fallen out of the habit of blogging regularly, I think I’ll build it and write about my progress in public. I want to try out a new gadget, nanodjango, anyway, and I find that writing about things as I learn them both helps me learn better and occasionally earns me a useful course correction when someone reads the thing I’m writing.

Desired Features

I really want this thing to look like a mashup of del.icio.us and the yahoo personalized homepage back in the day, with a little bit of Google Reader mixed in. For these latter two, I am talking about the times before enshittification really started to set in.

This means that I want every user of the thing (probably just me, but I’m going to build like it could be more than just me) to see the following when they visit the “start page”:

  • Their own curated list of favorite pages
  • Groups of interesting recent items from their feeds
  • Maybe interesting bits of data from various open sources, like weather forecasts, sports scores, headlines
    • (This might be taken care of by feeds… but those may have gotten too sparse now.)
  • Some kind of search box
  • Tagging/grouping/filtering

Then there should be UI to manage and find saved bookmarks. Maybe to rank and share them, if it really does turn into a multi-user system. And UI to manage the start page itself. One thing I’d like it to do is be configurable depending on which system I’m using. I’ll need to think about the smartest way to do that.

There should also be an API for adding bookmarks, and maybe Safari/Firefox/Chrome extensions to do that. Bookmarks should be able to have notes. As a stretch, there should possibly be some way to count clicks to let users sort by how frequently they use a site, but I’m leaning against that.

At the absolute worst, I’ll have fun trying a few new things out and get something I consider useful. It feels like others might find it useful as well, though.

That list gives me almost enough to get started. Before I can go very far beyond that, though, I need a working name. For now, I’ll call it Fischer.

Watch this space for more.

Follow-up Posts