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neoan
neoan

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Personal startpages?

TLDR;

Share your startpage repos or links in the comments so others can find them.

repo

demo

After switching to brave, I couldn't help but feeling thrown back a couple of years: The browser opens up a clean start-page with some basics like time and some stats over a wallpaper-background. It reminded me of the times where everyone used to have their personalized startpage (at least I had).

What do you really need?

Now, some of the concepts still around either offer all kinds of customization capabilities on a convoluted screen or simply aren't suitable for your needs. For me personally, a todo list, some quick access links and upcoming calendar events is what I wanted. And brave doesn't offer that. With neoan3, it should only take me an hour of my day to create my own startpage, right? Well, whoever tried to work throught the Microsoft Azure documentation before knows that something as simple as a calendar integration via API takes you from one page of the documentation to the next - daring to ask you if the information was helpful after each irrelevant paragraph.

Save yourself the trouble

However, as coders creating our own startpage is not only a fun little exercise, but makes total sense: who needs countless unnecessary options if you build what you need in the first place? In case the idea sounds appealing to you but you don't want to spend a lot of time on such a project as you currently don't need portfolio projects or lack the time otherwise (I can't blame you), I created a little repository to get you started.

I personally run a local apache so I can run the package as is, but feel free to host your creation online (like the demo on heroku) to share your creation.

Do share

Anyway, I would be interested to see other startpages from fellow devs. If you have a repository or link to such a project, please share so we can start somewhat of a collection.

Top comments (4)

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attkinsonjakob profile image
Jakob Attkinson

Why not use something like Gatsby or Gridsome? Much faster and easier to implement.

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sroehrl profile image
neoan

How so? I am not familiar Grindsome, but Gatsby would only have been an option if a suitable plugin would have existed. But even then, how is Gatsby faster or easier than neoan3?

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attkinsonjakob profile image
Jakob Attkinson

Gridsome is another open-source framework for building static websites, but it is based on VueJs while Gatsby is based on React.

You just deploy any of these frameworks, write the minimum amount of code you need to make your profile pretty and deploy it to Netlify. No need for a lot of tools, plugins and whatnot.

Should you want to add a blod or whatever type of dynamic data, you use a free headless content management and done.

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sroehrl profile image
neoan

I don't know how to respond to that in a meaningful way. I do understand how static site generators work but I am not talking about any of the things you mentioned. The only time saver for my project would have been an outlook calendar plugin. With neoan3 I am not only faster when developing a simple start-page, but since I don't have to deal with node deployment is also way easier as I don't need to proxy anything on the server (or have to use hosting solutions that do it for me like heroku or netlify). And of course I am biased as a contributor, but I honestly think neoan3 is the fastest way you can develop server side rendered pages.