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Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?

147 points by yosito ↗ HN
By personal start page, I mean a custom-made web page that you would set as the home page in your browser and use it as the starting point of doing things in the browser.

I'm considering building something with Next.js or Gatsby that I can self-host, but I'd love suggestions of the most customizable tools that would allow me to quickly integrate data "widgets" from diverse sources like Nextcloud, Fastmail, RSS readers (Inoreader, maybe), CalDAV, bank accounts, etc.

123 comments

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pacificmint
It's been years since I had one, and when I did it was plain, static html only. So I don't have any personal recommendations.

But in case you weren't aware, there is a subreddit for startpages (because, of course there is), you might find some inspiration and ideas there:

https://old.reddit.com/r/startpages/

Venkatesh10
One more interesting to subscribe to, Thanks! I've been thinking to build a curated list of websites across different subjects, do you think there's an aggregation subreddit or tool to build one as well?
fractal618
New tab page or more recently I've set my start page to a procedurally generated weather forecast image file hosted at weather.gov it works really well and it loads instantly which is critical for any start page in my opinion
jstx1
Empty new tab in Firefox works great. There are also blank new tab extensions if you use Chrome.
k8sToGo
My start page url is about:blank
bovermyer
I, too, rely on a completely blank tab.

I've never seen a need for a "start" page. The context when I open a browser changes almost every time; I never follow a routine.

trutannus
It's also yet another thing to set up again when you reinstall your OS. I do that not infrequently as it's faster than periodically uninstalling everything from the past year, like libraries, apt packages for one time needs, ect. A full refresh gets rid of even the stickiest configs that sometimes even purge and autoremove can't get at.

I've started to find that what's even better than a fully tricked out installation that's heavily customized, is an minimal installation with basic usability features you can install in 20 minutes.

vollmond
I like having half a dozen frequently used sites on my start page, as a better bookmark solution. Don't want a bar taking up screen real estate, but if I can click into my issue tracker, doc repo, email, etc from a new tab, that works great and then it goes away once I've loaded the site. Would be great if I could just have iframes of some of them (like the page listing all the timezones for my team so I know what time it is everywhere).
chrismorgan
Yeah, I have never desired anything but about:blank.

But I seldom see even that, because instead of opening a tab and then typing in a URL or query, I’ll type in the URL or query and press Alt+Enter which opens that URL or query in a new tab.

And even in Firefox’s Private Browsing windows, I have this in my userContent.css so that I get a blank page there too (I started doing this when they put an ad for their VPN service, but then like Haman of old scorned to kill just .vpn-promo):

  @-moz-document url("about:privatebrowsing") {
      body {
          display: none !important;
      }
  }
trutannus
Empty tab, with Firefox containers that automatically capture all google searches and open them in new tabs. That's what I have set up on my personal laptop.
sumtechguy
For me I have 3 variations. Blank page, some search landing page, or my.yahoo.com, thought the last one I am moving away from as less sites have RSS feeds.
lovelyviking
What is exactly works great about it?

It is useless. Also this is what I have to deal with instead of my homepage opened.

I cannot open my homepage from local file on a new tab and they do not fix it for years.

What should happen in their strange brains to understand that this is basic functionality and it is not working! If home page doesn't work the browser doesn't work.

Homepage from local file can be opened on a first tab. It is a bug if firefox can't do the same on a next tab. How difficult to comprehend this for firefox team?

throwaway1777
Very few people use this feature. Seems understandable it is low priority. Firefox is open source, which is great because you can work on a fix since you seem to care more than anyone else.
lovelyviking
I went through the hell of their system of bug reporting to report this bug. After some time they just deleted it stating it was re-assigned by some bright individual to some other bug that is not fixed for years. I argued that this bug is different but never got reply from that bright individual.

So why do you think that dealing with such bright individuals when I'll fix the bug would be a success story? I mean if the one in charge of the project opens a new tab that doesn't work properly and instead of fixing it this bright individual presumably goes along the lines you've described then what are the chances that my fix would be applied? If everything under control of such bright individuals that do not see it as a problem in the first place how working to support them is even justified ?

LuisMondragon
I use the empty dark new page extension for chrome/brave. The empty new tab was too bright for my dark environment.
Farow
I personally aim for a startpage that loads instantly and since browsers no longer let you use a local html file as one, I've made an extension that registers a custom new tab page.

I don't use any frameworks since it's a pretty simple page, essentially just groups of links. If you need to, you can always use something like fetch to load external resources.

Ma8ee
I'm using a local html file as a start page in Safari right now, and used the same file on Windows (Firefox) just a few months ago.
Farow
I believe Firefox and Chrome do not allow you to set a local html file as a new tab page. You can set it as a home page but then you need to manually navigate to it after creating a new tab.
Ma8ee
Now I had to try. I can make Firefox to open my Startpage whenever I open a new window, but not for each new tab. Chrome only as the first window after I start the browser. (MacOS)
mynameismon
Personally, I use Vivaldi, which has a simple (but opionated) start page
dusted
Last time I had a personal start page was during the windows 2000 days, it consisted of a few HTML files in my Documents directory, it was plain HTML and just linked to stuff.
penjelly
notion with links to various todolists, calendars & note taking areas & new tab redirect
lukedjn
I used to live in Netvibes.com, looks like it still exists and has a free tier.
stevenicr
use to use netvibes a lot.. and pageflakes.. and my.yahoo.com

LOVED these.

then as someone mentioned above thread social started to wall the gardens..

other feeds became harder to find and some stopped working.. some over inserted crap.

I really hope rss comes back stronger than before, those were good days!

chanandler_bong
I use Caret Tab. Nicely configurable, syncs with browser settings.
mouzogu
I used to have a flat static html file where I pulled in various RSS feeds using Google's old RSS Javascript API. Yahoo also had a neat library called pipes that allowed you to do something similar.

TBH i would avoid self hosting, as in my experience whatever middle point you will leverage for your feeds will end up being deprecated/sun-setted or whatever

godshatter
If all you're after is a static html file and it's only used as the home page for one machine, just save it on disk somewhere and access it through the file:/// protocol.
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quintenps
I've built a start page a while ago, if you're interested you can change the config and use it yourself. https://github.com/Quintenps/Startpagev2

What I really like about my personal start page is it's RSS feed. I found this article through that :). Other features are of course the bookmarks and light/dark theme.

Don't forget to use new tab redirect (my favorite) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab-redirect/i... it highlights the URL bar so when you're not interested in clicking a bookmark you can do a search query right away.

elaus
I use a small Ruby script that fetches some RSS feeds and creates a static HTML page with that content. The script gets executed via cronjob and is hosted locally on my machine, served via python's integrated web server. That way I have basically no loading time when opening a new tab and I'm independant from 3rd party services that close down or change in unwanted ways.

I use the 'New Tab Redirect' extension to set a local web page for new tabs in Chromium.

jordanmorgan10
I built swiftjectivec.com using Jekyll and Netlify. I’m in the iOS world by trade, and over the last decade web technology and the flavor of the week has changed faster than I care to keep up with. So this simple, dare I say “dumb” setup, is perfect for me. I also use the same approach for stuff I sell too, such as bestinclassiosapp.com

For me, the simplest thing with the smallest amount of failure points is key.

drran
I use simple TODO manager in local HTML file with local storage for data as the start page.
mattowen_uk
This is my personal Start Page:

https://imgur.com/a/RKHB5LX

It's built with a simple single file PHP that loads a list of links and formats them into collections of topic cards. The edit button lets me update the links file where-ever I am.

It's held centrally on a spare domain, and is set as the home and new tab page on all my machines.

gman83
I use the Custom New Tab URL extension that's set to my Notion page where I organize my projects.
satran
I have a custom built system: https://github.com/satran/edi It does two things I have longed in other systems:

- uses plain text files as storage

- embedded option to run shell scripts while rendering. Eg `!date +%D` would execute date and insert contents.

The part of using text files was that I can leverage unix tools. This allowed me to grep for todos, follow up things. Keep a format that works for me.

To your question about widgets, it mainly renders Markdown dolls so adding HTML should be simple.

acklenx
It's called a "home page". You even say that yourself. It's why the browser has a "home" button ... To take you to your (personal) home page. And even before that button and [saved] bookmarks, you had to have some place that contained your personal bookmarks. It was the page you set your browser to load when you opened it. And you did absolutely make it yourself (it was the first webpage I ever made).

The main/first page of a website was the "frontpage" to its visitors (but it surely felt like a home page to the owner - and it may have been).

In any web event, I think you will be best served by plain old html. It will be faster (in nearly all ways) than next.js or Gatsby.

biztos
I agree that a lot of browsers call it the "home page" or similar, but I don't think a lot of people call it that, so the term is ambiguous at best. How many people know that their browser has a Start Page (often customizable) and a Home Page (optional, pick a URL) in the first place?

Last time I had one, it was a big collection of work-related links, back when you could fit all the "important" documentation portals for a LAMP stack on one screen. :-)

TeeWEE
I dont, it's just distraction. I have bookmarks