Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

Personal portals allow individuals to construct an internet browser homepage (default page) with tools and links that are relevant and regularly used. Once you set up a personal portal account, you are able to customize your page/s with internet resources that are most useful to you. Most personal portal tools allow you to add specific windows, or flakes in Pageflakes, that are specialized tools. For example, you can have favorite links, to-do lists, note pad, important in materials from social bookmarking sites, social image (flickr) or video (YouTube) sites, etc. Once you have your page you will want to spend time explore all of the options. Most personal portals also allow you to set up multiple pages. So you might have your default page, pages for each class, and a “family resources” page.

Most are personal portals only allow for private pages for the individual logging on. Therefore, once you log on to a computer, any computer with internet access, you can go to the personal portal site, log on, and instantly have access to the internet tools you need! Pageflakes, a particular brand of personal portal, has a “public” option that allows individuals to share their portal pages.

Public Portal Tools:

• Google Homepage (http://www.google.com/ig)
• Pageflakes (http://www.pageflakes.com/)
• MyYahoo (http://my.yahoo.com/)

If you are someone who does not own your own computer, or uses public computers a lot, you may sincerely want to set up the following trio of accounts:

• Personal portal
• Social bookmarking
• Online storage (http://box.net)

With these three online tools, and some form of local storage tool (a disk or thumb drive, there are 32MG thumb drives on sale for $5ish), you can instantly “personalize” a generic public computer with your personal portal and social bookmarking accounts. And you can save all your documents at box.net, which allows for 1GB of storage for free. You may want to make another back-up of your files by either emailing them to yourself (using your email as storage), or uploading/working on them in a document sharing program (Google Docs, http://docs.google.com/, or Zoho writer, http://www.zohowriter.com/) which also saves the files as well.