A lot of folks use Netvibes as a feed reader and as such it does a decent job — to a point. Personally, after a certain number of subscriptions I find it a bit unwieldy and I don’t see leaving Google Reader any time soon.
So why do I still have Netvibes set as my start page on every machine and browser that I use? I find it makes a darned fine “dashboard”. I’ve organized it to notify me of email, track my important links and other useful information. No more fretting about keeping browsers and machines in sync.
What follows is a look at how I’ve arranged things.
On the first page, left-most column, I have my email and tasks. All my email is via Gmail these days (both hosted and free). I’ve combined all the hosted stuff to forward to one main account with tags so that I know where it came from (nice tutorial on that).
Below the email I have a pair of Tracks feeds (previous mentions) showing my next actions for my two most heavily used contexts. This gives me a sort of “in my face” look at what I have on my plate every time I start a browser or flip to the Netvibes tab. For me and my attention span that’s a very very good thing…
In the middle column I make heavy use of the Netvibes Bookmarks module and the tagging that it offers. I have a bunch of tagged bookmarks in there for stuff I visit frequently and by just clicking on a tag I see the appropriate set of marks. This works very well for me and gives me a sort of simple mental context switch for grouping related links. Hint: I’m not afraid to drop multiple tags on a link.
Below that is the Box.net widget. This makes it easy to grab frequently used files and/or to quickly shuttle files around when all else fails.
Since this is getting long, let me try to wrap it up with fewer visual aids. The right column on the front page has the weather widget for my area, a search widget tracking my blog for links (aren’t all bloggers, to some extent, narcissistic?) and a Google Translate widget because… well because it just comes in handy fairly often.
Second tab is full of Notes and Tasks widgets. I basically use it as an electronic scratch-pad. A place to store stuff or to track little ad-hoc projects. Bigger ad-hoc projects get their own tab for the duration, then get blown away.
Third tab has my del.icio.us feed (showing tags) to help out when the front tab bookmarks widget doesn’t have what I’m after. It also has a handful of other feeds that I like to keep an eye on. For instance, the Digg Technology category is one of ‘em.
And there you have it, my digital dashboard. What would you add?
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February 8th, 2007 
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[...] and as such, this did manage to finally catch my eye. In fact, I’ve switched from having Netvibes as my start page to the Google personalized page. Yep, I’m really that shallow — add some spiffy colors [...]