NetVibes: Google passwords in personalized web portal

Personalized web home pages should provide you with a secure, useful, stable and reliable portal or dashboard.  They should remove the need to type the same URL address each day and the risk of an address typo - especially as we now see top-level URL changes coming where  .con could become as comon as .com and .edi be a .edu typing error.

NetVibes from France is one of many current providers of what should be a personal web page.
It is not.

A personal web page builder would allow you to choose email provider links, such as a link to www.gmail.com – but instead NetVibes offers a widget to hold your Google Mail ID and password.  No thanks.  My browser no longer is doing that, why would I have your widget store the same private content on your server?

A corporation using a home page builder would likely not want personal GMAIL in the mix at all - let alone passwords stored on a NetVibes server. But apparently they are doing so.

Another service recently asked me to turn on Java in the browser on my net book.  No thanks.

One answer lies in a secure client-side web technology – such as is offered by www.curl.com – and using a framework in which the "builder" provider does not know where the user stores either that page template or widget field contents such as Google Mail ID and password. The challenge is to make the portal available to the user across multiple devices - and to restrict it to the company domain and the company-issued mobile device went that is corporate policy.

That challenge can be met at the expense of a few more steps in setup and the use of a user-selected trusted third-party who is at arms-length from the "builder" service. The latter need not know which trusted repository was selected.

Curl on the desktop is quite adequate to the challenge - but Curl 7.0 does not yet have a mobile solution.

This is not to minimize the challenge - as can be seen by the case of HushMail in Canada and their use of Java in the browser.

Ἀλκιβιάδου [ was heard out in the ] αὐλῇ

In Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades is heard in the "fore court" or αὐλῇ whereas in Esther the king's servants are said to be in the king's gate or aule.

The sheep might also be brought within the confines of the aule at night.

At Heidelberg there remains die alte Aula Universität Heidelberg.

In Spanish, where boys once gathered in the courtyard with there slates, the classrooms are aula.

poet Robert Hawkes

The poet Robert Hawkes will read in Fredericton at Molly's on Sunday at 2 PM [May 1, 2011].

Here are some relevant web links:


http://www.brokenjaw.com/catalog/pg36.htm

http://www.poets.ca/linktext/direct/hawkes.htm

http://books.google.com/bookse

http://w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/nble/h/hawkes_robert_ernest.html

http://www.amazon.com/Paradigms-Robert-Hawkes/dp/0864920326
http://www.amazon.ca/Paradigms-Robert-Hawkes/dp/0864920326

https://lib.unb.ca/archives/finding/hawkes/bio.html

http://www.gooselane.com/author/152

http://nbwriters.blogspot.com/2008/09/robert-hawkes-at-odd-sundays.html

http://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=10119

Nela Rio will also read on this occasion.

Bookmarks, Tags and Mind-Maps

One reason for a custom homepage is that bookmarks are not an adequate alternative.  Most users will accumulate too many untagged bookmarks for the bulk of those bookmarks to do more than slow down the startup of their browser or slowdown the time it takes to open bookmarks or to create a bookmark.

A genuine alternative to a custom home page is to mind-map or concept-map those bookmarks with a separate application - browsers do not offer mind-mapping as a bookmarking feature.

A less appealing alternative is to use a "personal" page at a service such as Yahoo.

A bookmarking web service such as delicious can be used as an alternative - and delicious bookmarks can be mind-mapped - but I find that delicious is just one of many useful links that I want on my home page.

My own home page offers immediate links to two other local home pages on my netbook - they come up even before my wireless connection is reestablished.  One local page is for things whose nexus is Aule browsers and the other is specifically for the Curl programming language and other languages useful for the web: Rebol, Icon, Logtalk, Oz, Smalltalk, JavaScript.

One thing distinctive about my home page is that it allows me to select a wikipedia search by language so that my search can begin at a Russian or a Spanish page instead of my usual French,English or German choices for fr.wikipedia.org or the en or de options.  There is also a link to freebase and to  page which is itself a good jumping off point with many links to the topic of RDF.

Home Page

The simplest home page would be on the computer you use most often - and it would have a counterpart o some accessible website such as google or blogspot.

That simple home page would have the links that you rely on to get things done - and the ability to hold onto requests that you make when off-line or when a site is down.

Tiddlywiki is one such option, but for many people it is too complex.  It is not really what you want for your young child's netbook or tablet.

An "aule" is an entryway or hallway or hall: a starting point, if you will.

My preferred aule are in Curl from www.curl.com but aule pages can be very useful when built in simple HTML or in HTML+JavaScript.