Protopage
I’ll get to Protopage in a second. First, I’ll begin my story talking about the new Google Toolbar for Firefox.
I started using the new Google Toolbar a few days ago. The toolbar has been out for a few months, but it seems like it just got out of beta. I’m amazed that it wasn’t in beta for years like the rest of Google’s offerings ;-)
The Google toolbar supports the “Suggest” functionality so I no longer need to kep Google as my start page.
Now I’ll start talking about Protopage. I heard about Protopage via CommandN. It’s a dazzling exploitation of DHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Basically it’s an AJAX playground. It could make for an ideal start page.
After a quick and easy registration, I was off. Here is what the start page looks like when you first load it up:
The amazing thing is that you can drag and drop all of those green panes like you’re in a thick-client app. You can change your background and colors like so:
Since’t it’s using web technologies you have a lot of power to create links, use a rich variety of images, have massive control over color and styling, etc.
I’m probably going to delete a lot of that default stuff and keep the page pretty simple. I’ll let you know how this experiment works out.