Web workshop part 1: Personal portals

What's a personal portal?

You'll have come across portals as you surf the web - they're the shop windows that provide a taste of the content inside, like the front page of Yahoo.com, bbc.co.uk, or even OpenLearn. They're partly there to help you find your way round, and partly to distract you with the promise of glittery, exciting new things just a click away.

While these pages are put together by a team of experts, their role as shop windows means they're likely to contain as much stuff you don't want to know about as well as the stuff you do. How much better it would be if you could choose what you wanted to appear on your portal.

Why would I want to do that?

At the dawn of the internet, people got the information they wanted by visiting the sites it appeared on - each visit to a web site was like going to a river and filling a bucket. So you might visit bbc.co.uk/news to get the national headlines, liverpoolecho.co.uk for your local news, another site to find out how your team was doing, and so on.

Now, though, most sites publish their content as 'feeds' - or, if you like, it's like the walk to the river has been replaced by a mains water network that brings the information to you. But, just as you need to have a sink and a tap to make use of a water main that passes your house, you'll need some way of being able to draw content out of the feeds. There are a lot of different ways to get yourself plumbed in, but personal portals are amongst the easiest.

And because these portals are web-based, you can log in to them anywhere you find a computer connected to the internet.

What do I need to do?

The first step is to choose which personal portal you wish to use - there are a growing number. Google offers iGoogle; Yahoo has MyYahoo; Microsoft have a number of services which do similar things. We're going to look closely at Netvibes to give you an idea of what these portals can do, but all work in broadly similar ways.

The first step, then, is to visit the Netvibes page (opens in new window). You can print out this workshop to refer to as you poke around Netvibes. Or you can have this page and Netvibes open side-by-side, in separate browser windows.

Netvibes

You'll notice that it comes with information from different websites already displayed on the page - we'll take a closer look at that in a moment. You might also spot that Netvibes is currently in 'Beta'. When a piece of software tells you it's in 'Beta', it means that it's effectively still got its stabilisers on. And like a bike with stabilisers, 'Beta' services might not run very smoothly all the time and can be prone to falling over.

On the left hand side of the page, you can click a link to register. You don't have to - Netvibes will use a browser cookie to recognise you whenever you use the PC you're currently on - but it's simple enough to do: give your email address and make up a password (don't reuse a password you use for other sites) - and then you'll be able to access your customised site from any computer.

Next: making Netvibes your own