Your sources. Your surface.

Feed Box is a browser home where the things I choose to follow each have their own place.

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After iGoogle

iGoogle had a specific idea about what a browser home could be: a place you configured yourself. You chose your sources. You decided where each one went. You looked at them all at once from a single surface.

When iGoogle disappeared, that way of using a browser home largely disappeared with it. But the underlying design principle — choosing your sources, giving each one a place, and seeing them together as a surface — remained a useful way to think about information.

Feed Box is where that principle landed, rebuilt around what I actually need from a browser home in 2026.

Why a surface?

Most information interfaces organize things into a single vertical stream. One source feeds into the next. The order is set before you arrive. What you see first is determined by what the system decided was next.

A stream is built for following one sequence. A surface is built for taking in several sources at once.

Streams work well for reading. When you want to follow a single thread, scrolling through a sequence is a natural fit. Feed Box doesn't replace that use — it handles a different one.

When you want to see what's happening across multiple sources before deciding where to look, a surface works differently. You arrive at the page. Several sources are already in view. You scan, not scroll. You decide where to direct your attention, not the interface.

Feed Box uses a dense three-column layout on desktop — not as a design preference, but because that density is what makes the surface work. More sources visible at once means the overview is actually an overview.

The same place

You arrange the boxes yourself — in Edit Mode, by dragging each one to where you want it. After that, the positions are yours.

What's inside changes. Where it sits does not.

New items arrive. Unread counts change. A fetch fails and recovers. The last-updated time shifts. None of that moves a box. Feed Box doesn't reorder based on freshness, activity, or anything else. The layout you set is the layout you return to.

This matters for the surface to work as a surface. If sources moved around based on what was happening inside them, you'd spend time finding where things went instead of reading them. Spatial familiarity — knowing roughly where each source lives — is part of what makes the overview fast.

I choose what's here

The surface contains whatever I decided to put there. RSS and Atom feeds from sites I follow. Keyword searches I've registered in Google News, tracked as search RSS feeds that update with matching results. A NEXT box where I keep what I'm working on or thinking about. World Time for the cities whose hours I need to know. Exchange Rate for the currency pairs I check. A TIME display for the current moment. And LIVE WINDOW, a small opening to somewhere else — a live feed, a camera, a stream.

These things are different in kind. News, my own next actions, the world's clocks, market rates, the present hour, a distant reality. What they have in common is that I chose to put them here, and here is where they stay.

Feed Box doesn't recommend what to read. It doesn't rank by importance or decide which source deserves more of my attention. Nothing gets promoted to the top because an algorithm decided it was relevant. What's here is what I put here. The decision stays with me.

The way out

Feed Box is not a knowledge management system. It doesn't accumulate everything you read. The basic motion is: look across the surface, find something worth keeping, and send it somewhere it can live.

You can send any article to Obsidian — specifically, to today's daily note in your Vault. You can add a note alongside it: why you're keeping this, what it connects to, what you want to do with it. Or not. The handoff goes one way. Feed Box passes the article to Obsidian and doesn't read your Vault or confirm whether the handoff succeeded.

The cycle is: overview, select, pass on. What you don't send, you leave behind. That's the point. A surface that held everything you ever looked at wouldn't be a surface for looking — it would be an archive.

Resident

Something small lives on the page. Not everything here needs a purpose.