43 Folders

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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Start page cycling

I came up with this potentially hair-brained idea a half hour ago or so and wanted to share it with you guys to see what you thought.

The idea is to have a free/very cheap service that gives you a personal url to set as a start page. You can then configure it to redirect in several ways:
a) go to certain pages at certain times / days
b) go to a page randomly from a set
c) go to a page sequentially from a set

+ potentially go to a page once every day the first time you visit the redirection.

For instance, you could have it go to a certain page during work time, another at other times, etc. Or maybe just have a "message" instead of a URL it displays. It could also keep stats perhaps. Particularly crafty users could chain them together.

It could be a totally free service w/donations, or nag you every x times to pay the $4 or whatever it is. And whatever it is, it would be all ajaxy and very polished/well executed.

Potentially useful? Or lame?

Stew's picture

I always get a...

solidsnot wrote:
I always get a bit frustrated that I'm limited to one home page. I like a bit of variety when I'm starting up my web browsers. ;)

If you're using Firefox, you can set the browser to open multiple home pages in separate tabs. Just set your homepage URL to the sites you want and separate each with a pipe "|", i.e. http://www.yahoo.com">http://www.google.com[/url] | [url]http://www.yahoo.com
It's not randomizable, but I use it to keep open a tab of Backpack so that it's always available.

 
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