| Lesson 8 Personalisation and home pages in this lesson we will talk about personalising web browsers and cross-session management of browsers, and you will also create your own homepage. To start with, we'll spend 5–10 minutes discussing the prep from last lesson. Firefox add-ons allow for extensive customisation of the browser but contemporary web browsers allow a user to change the default layout in other ways. Mark Pilgrim shows how to do all of the following:
Another way of customising a web browser to suit yourself is to create a home page. Mark Pilgrim shows how to use a group of tabs as the homepage — take a look at this tutorial. There's more than one way to create a formal homepage and, for an alternative, we'll focus on iGoogle. Open http://www.google.com/ig in Firefox and play with the the options for design. You don't need a Google account to do this. Be sure to note: tabs; drag and drop positioning of separate items; 'add stuff'. Of course, your iGoogle page will be lost between sessions unless you save it — and to do this you now need to create a (free) Google account. Click on 'Sign in' and then, unless you already have an account, on 'Create an account now'. You'll need to enter an existing email address — you can use your school address (or another). Finish creating your own iGoogle page and save it: you now have a homepage you can open at school. (A simple guide to creating tabs on your new homepage is Creating Tabs on iGoogle.) Now, or for prep, look at creating your own gadgets for your homepage: iGoogle: Make your own gadget. Prep: i) finish designing your personal Google homepage and ii) create a group of tabs in Firefox as a homepage. The first can be shown in class next week. For the latter, take a screenshot (to find out how to take a screenshot on a Windows machine, look at either this page or this page) and bring it in to class next week to discuss. |