• 0

Customised Startpage


Question

hey guys/girls,

im thinking of creating a customised start page for IE, something that shows the following:

neowin.net news headlines

local news

local weather

my favourite links

whether or not i have new email (hotmail)

bank balances

calender reminders

what i want to know is, can such a start page be made?

which would be better to program it in? asp, jsp or php?

does anyone have any scripts or know where to find any or know how to write them that would interact with MS Money 2003 and weather scripts and Outlook Calender?

lastly, which would be better for the document type server? IIS or apache? and which would be easier to set up?

thanks all, no hurry for a reply too

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0

I think apache, but it should not really matter.

You can do this, will be hard though.

neowin.net news headlines - just read an rdf file or so

local news - rdf file if possible

local weather - i believe weather.com has an api or something like that, my friend does it

my favourite links - open your fav folder and put the links in an array or something like that

whether or not i have new email (hotmail) - can be done for sure, just dont know how

bank balances - not sure

calender reminders - maybe setup a task to export them (if possible, not familiar w/ outlook calander much), then have php read them like every night ?

this is just what I thought up in my head, im not 100% sure if every single one of them is possible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Is this going to be a local page stored on your computer? If it will be, you will most likely need some kind of web server with some other capabilities. Apache would be my choice as the web server, and it is a bitch to set up all the scripting support for it. So I will tell you about the thing I use to do it. Go to http://www.foxserv.net/portal.php and download FoxServ. It sets up Apache, PHP, Perl and MySQL. It is always using the most up-to-date versions of those services too, it is very nice. Then it is basically plugging in the rdf extensions, some of the other stuff might be a little harder and require custom coding.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Neowin, news, weather, links and maybe hotmail might be pretty easy. The banking would need to probably be a real programming, something that can interact with the Money API, might want to cancel that feature out. And maybe there is some kind of saved file from Outlook that you could possibly 'include' or link to.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

cheers guys i appreciate the help. im gunna do it with apache and see what i can come up with. If it works out ill host the page and let you all have a copy :)

(yes it will b hosted locally as well)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

ok i got a slight problem...

i get this error when i load the page:

Warning: Failed opening 'http://neowin.net/backend.php?page=main' for inclusion (include_path='') in D:\chris\My Websites\MyStartPage\index.php on line 152

My line 152 of index.php reads:

<?php include("http://neowin.net/backend.php?page=main"); ?>

anyone know whats wrong? im running php under IIS 5.1 and the php works fine when i do a <?php phpinfo() ?>

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

I would just use Samurize, it can do almost all of that for ya... Neowin news, pop3 mail, calender, weather, possibly news and such. Links could just be a php array, dunno about bank balance

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
Anyone know of any of those programs to install apache, php, mysql, ect all in one install???

There are others that will do this, but not as well as Foxserv.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.