Personal web portals and information management

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Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 4, 2009 at 04:06 PM

I use Protopage as my personal web portal which does have some information management widgets (such as to do lists, calendars, post-it notes, bookmarks etc.), and I was wondering what other solutions people are using that are browser-based. A few years ago I did compare Protopage with some of the other providers out there (iGoogle, Netvibes etc.) but Protopage won hands down, and I had no need to look for another solution.

The main advantage of Protopage over any other solution I’ve seen is the control it gives over customisation. Any widget can be repositioned anywhere, the interface is clean, and it’s very easy to add new tabs and widgets. It is also great as an RSS reader (my main one for news).

Although to be entirely honest I haven’t ended up using the ‘to do’ features all that much, as I prefer to use my Palm TX for that. But it’s certainly possible to use them even for some basic hierarchical outlining (although there is no export feature). I do use it however for monitoring major project milestones, by using a widget that allows the embedding of web pages. So I embedded a Google Doc spreadsheet that I use as a Gantt chart and which is my home page in my browser. Naturally I have hundreds of my most frequent URLs stored in the other tabs, so Protopage does work as a kind of a dashboard for my virtual world.

I should add that Protopage have recently introduced banner advertising, although it doesn’t bother me because I can close them with one click and they go permanently away for the session, unless you do a full-page refresh. Since everyone is talking about cloud computing, I imagine that sooner or later most information management tasks will move to the web.

doctorandus

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