Confessions of an iGoogle User

by
in pipedot on (#3ER)
I admit it. I was one of the 7.1 million users of the ill-fated service, iGoogle. For over eight years, Google offered a quick glance of your favorite news feeds on a customizable, fast loading, and ad-free homepage. Similar to Reader's fate a few months earlier, Google retired the service in November 2013, leaving its users to look for alternatives.

For the past few months, I have tried a number of these alternatives. Unfortunately, most are either riddled with ads or exist as JavaScript heavyweights. Ad Block Plus can remove most of the ads, but it often leaves giant holes on the page. Because I set the page as my homepage, I also don't like waiting for the browser to load every JavaScript library know to man just to render the page's "Web 2.0" layout.

Luckily, I'm a developer - a developer with an itch. Therefore, Pipedot now offers a user-customizable feed page! An example feed page can be seen here or you can go to your Pipedot user-page at http://yourusername.pipedot.org/ to set up your own page.
Reply 18 comments

Quick note about HTTPS (Score: 4, Informative)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 00:23 (#5D)

My current HTTPS certificate is valid for pipedot.org (and www.pipedot.org) only. I'm in the process of getting a wildcard cert (*.pipedot.org) so that the subdomains (yourusername.pipedot.org) will work over HTTPS, but the validation process will take another few days.

Very nice .. and a good feed for all (Score: 3, Informative)

by wjwlsn@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 02:37 (#5E)

What a pleasant surprise! This feature makes so much sense for a site like this, and it really sets Pipedot apart from its cousins. Great job!

In addition, here's a Google Groups feed for the comp.misc newsgroup. Anybody that visits Pipedot will probably like this as well.

https://groups.google.com/forum/feed/comp.misc/topics/rss.xml

Re: Very nice .. and a good feed for all (Score: 3, Informative)

by jonh@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 07:58 (#5M)

This is a fantastic feature, and I'm going to start using jonh.pipedot.org as my homepage :D

FWIW, s'qute has an RSS feed at http://squte.com/rss.xml , although it has some overlap with the comp.misc one.

Anyone want to evangelize this on other sites? I can look into that tomorrow unless anyone wants the honours while I'm asleep for the next 8 hours? :)

Re: Very nice .. and a good feed for all (Score: 2, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 12:24 (#5P)

I actually learned about Pipedot via the comp.misc Usenet group (I'm RS Wood over there) so here's a second vote in favor of adding the comp.misc feed to the feed page. There's a decent amount of cross-fertilization between sites at the moment, and I'm hoping that friendly competition leads to more and better conversation and commenting for everyone.

The sample page looks great (Score: 2, Informative)

by unitron@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 03:20 (#5F)

As does the main page.

If soylent looked like pipedot, I, for one, would welcome our new blue-green overlords.

Re: The sample page looks great (Score: 3, Interesting)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 03:49 (#5G)

We should all do our best to keep both sites going. Soylent definitely has more traffic, but there's no reason they can't co-exist.

Re: The sample page looks great (Score: 2, Informative)

by spallshurgenson@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 04:07 (#5K)

I didn't hear about Pipedot until today, although I am an active user/reader of a number of the other alternatives. It definitely needs more mention. Be sure to submit a story about its existence to other sites (normally, the creation of a news aggregator would not be news, but given the recent slashdot fiasco it is an interesting addendum to that story).

I was never an iGoogle user and never saw the point of similar sites, but I love the Pipedot homepages and now I'm a convert. It's probably because it has such a limited amount of chrome; it's all content, no gloss.

Re: The sample page looks great (Score: 2, Informative)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 21:52 (#5T)

>It's probably because it has such a limited amount of chrome; it's all content, no gloss.

Yep. Looks great, delivers the goods.

I'm doing my part by putting a reference to |. in my SoylentNews .sig (hopefully in a humorous, non-spammy way). |. also ran a story when Soylent launched--I'm not sure if they've returned the favor. I'd really like to see both sites thrive.

Re: The sample page looks great (Score: 1, Informative)

by wezeldog@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 13:16 (#5Q)

I think it's a great idea. I missed having a portal page that I could organize the news feeds. Most we're like stated above. You could add some things, but it was surrounded by curated junk and ads.

Oh, very cool! (Score: 2, Interesting)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 03:50 (#5H)

That is all. :)

Very nice (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-02-24 12:21 (#5N)

It looks great. I actually found it by accident yesterday when I was trying to get this site's RSS feed (found that too). It reminds me of linuxhomepage.com but better because it's customizable.

By the way, no one asked but I've been visiting this site on Android browsers, Opera, Safari, and now Chrome and it renders well in all of them. Whatever you're doing, you're doing right.

Time to drive some more traffic to this site.

Bugs and Feature Suggestions. (Score: 0)

by wildwombat@pipedot.org on 2014-02-25 05:48 (#62)

Is there a preferred way to report bugs and make feature requests? Not just for the homepage but for pipedot as a whole?

Cheers,
-WW

Know who's still around? (Score: 2, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-02-26 11:55 (#6R)

Just checked in on it, because I used and liked the service in my pre-Google days. http://my.yahoo.com. Somewhat heavy on the eye-candy, but that's their audience these days. And it works pretty damned well!

Checking in on it made me notice their home page looks a lot better than before, and their search engine delivered better results than I was expecting.

Not sure what their new CEO is doing, but she's doing something right and I hope she continues to do more of it.