Change = Bad

[naomikritzer]

Yahoo redesigned its home page a month or two back. I use Yahoo as my home page, mainly out of habit and because it gives me headlines, and immediately clicked the "switch back" button so that the headlines went back to the upper right quadrant where they belonged.

Now there's a banner at the top of my Yahoo home page saying that this page will be retired on September 1st.

Bastards. So, okay, I need a new home page, because damned if I'm going to let them inflict this ugly new home page on me. I want headlines that go in the upper right quadrant (where they belong, dammit!) and if I can put weather on there too, so much the better. Suggestions?

Comments

[jiawen]

I don't use it as my home page (I don't really have one -- I use Firefox, so I basically have multiple home pages), but I've found Google News to be pretty good so far. You can customize it as you want, with different standard sections (World, US, Business, Sci/Tech, etc.), and you can create topics (via searching for keywords). I have a section on GLBT news and feeds from mainland China and Taiwan (in Chinese). You have to let Google set cookies on your machine, and I don't know how their selection of news services compares to Yahoo's, but it's been pretty good so far.

[splagxna.livejournal.com]

i think you want google. you can set your 'my google' home with a variety of rss feeds (all sorts of headlines), weather, summary your gmail/google calendar if you've got it, etc, and you can drag them about to organize however you like.

it /may/ require a google login; i don't remember for sure. if it does, and you want one and can't get it elsewhere, i have approximately a zillion invites sitting wasted.

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

If you don't mind having your searched tracked, or don't mind setting up your home page each time you fire up a webbrowser, then Google is the way to go.

[maggiedr.livejournal.com]

Call me old and crotchety, but I hate the new look of yahoo too. I just have google as my homepage though.

What I do use are Yahoo Widgets for my desktop. I have My News and the weather, a clock and a calendar, all on my desktop. So I see the news feeds and weather even if I don't have my browser up. I can move them around where I want on the desktop and I set them so they are fairly transparent too.

If I want to read one of the articles, I click on it and it brings up my browser (Firefox) to that site. I seldom look at My Yahoo anymore since I downloaded the widgets.

[jimlawrence.livejournal.com]

Yes! Thank you. I'm glad to see that I am not the only cranky curmudgeon around... Yahoo has really ticked me off with this... I've used them as my home page for several years (after one of the news sites "improved" their site and erased all of my customized settings).

I may switch to turnto10.com or projo.com for my home page -- which wouldn't help you since I doubt that yould be interested in the Rhode Island area news from channel 10 Providence or the Providence Journal newspaper. (And those pages are kind of annoyingly "busy" too.)

Hmmm, I could always rework the index page of my own Web page to snag some news feeds and then use that as my home page... come to think of it, wasn't that one of the reasons people set up home pages back in the early days of Mosaic/Netscape, to give themselves a handy starting point with links to useful or interesting URLs? (The 10th anniversary of my personal site is only a few weeks away... maybe I should go totally retro?)

I don't want to use Google for a home page -- this is mostly because of their hypocrisy as they violated their own motto ("Don't be evil") in the way they have sucked up to the Chinese dictatorship just like Microsoft.

[jpnchgo.livejournal.com]

I use MSNBC.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

Sorry.....

[jpnchgo.livejournal.com]

....you don't know me....found your site via Scalzi....just thought I'd say hello, since I posted my first comment here.

I'm John from Chicago, by the way.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I use 'my yahoo' which lets me decide if I want to see the annoying new changes. (no, I do not.)

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

That sucks.

I can't really help -- I just have Google.ca, and sometimes www.cbc.ca.

Customized Google

[pinguim.livejournal.com]

I second the suggestion to use the personalized Google as your homepage. You can arrange a variety of RSS feeds to your liking -- both placement and content. You can add RSS feeds of your own (e.g. blogs you read) or choose from ones that Google offers including major newspapers, weather, etc. See www.google.com/ig