It might be just me, but I don’t get the buzz about AJAX homepages. I mean, sure, they’re AJAX and sparkly and draggy and all that – but they’re still portals, aren’t they? I never wanted portals to be more dynamic, or even open to third-party-authored widgets – I wanted them to go away altogether. My feed reading is too expansive to fit inside little headline widgets, my weather report sits in my menu bar, and for anything else that does fit into a little widget I’ve got Dashboard. This just seems like another thing that’s neat like digital watches, with a horrible user interface for doing anything actually useful.
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Hi there! My name is Leslie Michael Orchard. I'm a serially enthusiastic, caffeine-dependent {web,mad,computer} scientist and {tech,scifi} writer working for the Mozilla Corporation and living near Ann Arbor / Detroit in Michigan.
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3 Comments
I agree. AJAX homepages are like those useless gadgets you can buy: an umbrella with a torch in the handle, a kettle that is also a radio, etc.
What if the AJAX homepage was something you had the source code for, you ran it on localhost or on your own server and it encouraged hacking?
Eh, even if I had the source, I don’t think I’d care. It’s just another form of the “lots of tiny windows on a page” portal that I thought we’d left back in the 90’s. I’d build a Dashboard or Konfabulator widget before I build a web portal widget. Every other use of a portal I can think of, I’d rather see in a less cramped UI.