I notice iGoogle’s notice of closure has disappeared from my, former, homepage. Either way, I have made some pretty good progress towards my requirements of filling the vacuum.
The biggest being: stickynotes. I keep all sorts of random important stuff there that I could never do without: birthdays, mySql queries that I only need about once a year, phone numbers, websites, names, etc.
anyway, here it is: myGoogol
Yeah, they’ve probably trademarked those two real words. Trade marking real words shouldn’t be legal. If you want to trademark something it should have to be terribly misspelled.
I would like to git-hub this to let people add features, but I haven’t thought of a way to do that and keep things secure.
Security: it does pretty much require httpS, but the user data is not encrypted. I need to research a good way to do that – javaScript decryption? nah, that can’t be right.
update: Some of the user data is now encrypted with – javascript.
update2: some more of it is now secure – more javascript. I did have to make a bit of a compromise to prevent requiring password prompting on every page reload. will try to make it better soon.
update3: is now more secure. the encryption key is not stored at the server. However it is stored in a cookie, which unfortunately is transmitted to the server on every request. I will look into alternative client-side data storage some more. From what I’ve read so far it does not work in older IE[6,7]. So the cookie plan may be a good fallback.
update4: localStorage is now used. Cookies are the fallback.
this is now probably one of the most secure sites on the internet. Would be at least pretty challenging to decrypt users data.
The encryption stuff is going to create a critical window of potential error: password changes. The key for encryption is based on the password. If the password is changed the unencrypted-client-side data will need to be re-encrypted. If for any reason this fails, the cryptography will run into problems, potential for data loss.
I’d definitely at least like to setup a public git-log view, with comments section.
major feature it’s currently lacking: change password.
now it has change password.
Next:
-events – set a date and time, and will either be a count down or count up
My biggest use of the igoogle start page is the “DAYS SINCE COUNTER” by Bernie T of Leancode Inc who can be addressed: widgets@leancode.com
A quick web search finds that many people agree on the importance of this little tool: dog heart-worm pills, haircuts, battery change in the window candles… all the mundane things which have to be attended to with regularity.
Thanks for your hard work. I’d be willing to pay for a start page clone of igoogle.
Thank you from New Jersey and keep me posted.