Convergence
"making the Internet smaller, one homepage at a time"
There are three main points to my submission:
1. It is entirely css (except for the weather forecast which i borrowed from wundergournd.com)
2. It is a liquid layout.
3. It is a fully customizable portal to the rest of the Internet, based on scriptable 'atoms'.
Details about the three follow:
CSS - No matter what you guys do, you should definitely go to a full css layout. If you move everything away from the table layout, then users can develop and share their own skins for the site(and someone could even develop a little skin atom that goes into my homepage). You essentially created an free work force, because people do this as a hobby!
Another benefit is that the user can modify the page to their liking, quite easily. for example, the font is too small, ctrl+scroll wheel and it is larger, hooray. severely dislike the font, no problem, just swap it with one you like.
With more time, I would smooth out those rough edges caused by browser incompatibilities, just make it look tighter (the odd margins for the ul's for example need to be reworked). maybe delineate sections by color changes, so not everything is blue and white. Oh and I would add more images, actually maybe just an image 'atom'.
Liquid - Fixed width layouts are so limiting, yet if you do not want to alienate the lowest common denominator, you are almost bound to the creation of one. I think I found a solution I like, 'atoms' that all float on the page, in their simple format. if you want to know more, you can maximize them, which makes them fill 100% of the screen space, pushing the other 'atoms' out of the way. I was undecided whether to do this or to have it come up to the front and expand over everything. I think it is better this way, because nothing is obscured.
With more time, I would finesse the script so that when it expanded the page scrolled so that it was at the top, similar to a # link. also, right now it is a bit hackish since ie was having problems reading the style attributes of some of the divs, and it would be much better if it worked the way that they commented out section did, then you could have more than one hidden div in each atom.
'Atoms' are the crux of this page. They allow the users to decide what they want to see. I mocked up a couple, like the favorites box which stores, you guessed it, your favorites. or the notepad, which lets you write notes to yourself, whether it is a to-do-list or random bits of information, it is up to you. I think having an rssfeed reader to handle all of my feeds would be great, then I could just pop onto the bbc, from anywhere in the world, and find out what is going on that is important to me.
one of the more ambitious atom's is the messenger box, which would allow you to connect to any of your messaging networks (that have api's written for them).
Currently the order is fixed, but of course, if it were to go to production, you would need to be able to reorder the 'atoms' as you saw fit.
What i have here is very similar to the google personalized homepage, with the one major difference being that the atom's have two states of use: simple(what you see when the page loads) and expanded(what you see when you maximize it). Ideally the expanded version of each atom would greatly enhance and build upon the simple version.
If I had more time, I would put some very serious thought into what atoms I might want, like maybe I don't want just a tv atom, instead i want a multimedia atom. What parts of the bbc specifically do I want, a news section of course, possibly the tv guide... I might actually write some of the ajax apps needed to get them to work, as well, like say the rss feed reader, or the favorites bar.
The ultimate point of this homepage is to create a place that brings you all the information, so instead of going to 15 different sites, I just go to one, that access all the others.
- 23 May 2006 12:18
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