Just wanted to do a quick blog on Netvibes I was put onto it by a friend of mine (SuperDave) and have not stopped using it as my homepage since, its the first thing I do when I use a new PC or rebuild my own, set my homepage !

Once you’ve signed up, which only requires an email address and a password, Netvibes provides content tailored for the country you live in – although you can change this if you wish. There’s certainly no shortage of items for you to play around with, most of which have been created by the Netvibes community. There are currently over 600 modules to choose from, including clocks, calendars, puzzles, games, photos and so on. The quality is variable, but there are loads of great widgets to add to your pages.

It’s very easy to customise each Component. All you have to do is move your cursor over a window and the option to edit it will appear. You can change the title bar colour and various other details depending on the module itself.

In addition to modules, Netvibes does a good job of handling news feeds. There are over 8,500 RSS/Atom feeds submitted by users that you can add to your page. If you prefer you can select the most popular choices from the Feed Directory or enter the web address of a particular feed location. These are also customisable. You can set how many headlines to view at once, choose whether to have a compact or more spacious display and also decide if links should open on the source page or directly in Netvibes. Hovering your cursor over any headline instantly generates a preview of it in a littte floating window.

As well as modules and feeds, there are over 680 podcasts, 148 events and 2,602 tabs to add. The search facility which lets you find or filter content on your page is another excellent inclusion.

I have mine setup with tabs for each technology I am interested in and add the rss feeds to the pages as I find them, this enables you to quickly view new articles and keep yourself up to date.