2008-05-23

FirstPagr, your (growing) web sites on a page

Let me introduce our web app FirstPagr, a really simple tool to make a really simple website. It makes a static page that can contain lists. It does not do any automatic aggregation of your contents elsewhere or any interactive feature like commenting or RSS. You, no one or no machine else, enter everything you want on the page manually. Why such a primitive tool?

When you created a blog, you thought it would be your 'homepage'. You may have even bought a domain (yourname.com) and associated it with the blog. But things changed. Now, you may spend more time at Facebook or with Twitter. Even worse(?) you may create another blog, or a tumblog. So, what is your 'home' page? You wonder or you don't care, if you were like me.

A side effect of this is that you stop caring about giving your own domain name to your sites. Either you have no choice of putting a custom domain name (e.g. Facebook) or, even if you did, you are tired of coming up with and buying new domains.

You may have linked sites with each other. Your blog lists all your other sites, and your facebook profile lists all your other sites, and your friendfeed lists... Some people seem to think that(linking) is natural on the web. But in my eyes, that seems like 'over-linking'. (In fact, a recent fashion seems to be copying and pasting contents everywhere. That's ... over-loading.) I don't enjoy looking at all those small icons at a sidebar. It only gives me the impression that this person is another contributor/victim of information overload.

So we created FirstPagr to let us make the simplest site that can link to other sites of yours. You can only have one page. You type in the site name and create lists of your sites (with some descriptions, if you want). That's it.

So far, I am personally very happy as a user. I used to associate www.hyokon.com with my blog, but now with my FirstPagr. Have a look and try yourself.

2 comments:

  1. The idea illustrates an elegant line of thought, which may be its purpose. But I think there's a flaw, which is that people whose homepages have gradually been superceded by flickr, blogger, facebook et al have been online for 10-15 years and so need somewhere to host lots of legacy content as well as the homepage itself.

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  2. I agree. But an online storage might be a better solution for that, if I understood correctly.

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