Managing your digital life

A good friend of mine once said “I feel like I’m trying to get a sip of water from a fire hose on full blast!” The only difference in my situation is that the “sip of water” is information I want and the “fire hose” is the internet. Like many others, I just want to check things I’m interested in, my morning e-paper, without loading fifty tabs in my browser. I often found myself in that situation a few months back, until someone turned me on to Netvibes. I know there are a million different feed-readers or hubs that you can use out there, so if you are already using one, you can disregard this tip.

In a nutshell Netvibes is a personal start page to manage your digital life. The web application founded in 2005 allows you to add widgets, feeds and completely personalize how you receive your information online. I enjoy it most because I am always on the move, whether I am on my home computer, school computer or work computer I can access it without any problem. Another reason I love it, is because it gives you the bare-bone information in real time. No need to wait for graphics to load, or having to check a bundle of websites separately. Lastly, for those of you who will never trust your information hosted elsewhere, Netvibes allows you to create a tidy little .opml file for backing up your settings (which can be read with most feed-readers or notepad). In fact, for you designers out there – I have bundled up my “design gallery” tab so that you can give it a test run. All you need to do is:

1. Download zip file (1.5KB) 

2. Go to http://www.netvibes.com/ 

3. You don't even need to sign up to try it. Just go to "add content" in the top left, then add a feed, and import the opml file! that's it.