Why a Homepage Should Be a Place, Not a Feed

For years, I never really found a replacement for iGoogle.

This was not because I needed another RSS reader. RSS readers continued to exist after iGoogle disappeared, and many of them became far more polished than iGoogle ever was.

But they did not solve the problem I had.

For a long time, I could not decide what my browser homepage should be.

I tried search pages, blank pages, bookmarks, dashboards, and new-tab extensions. They were useful in different ways, but none of them felt like a place I wanted to return to every day.

Eventually, I realized that what I missed about iGoogle was not any particular widget.

I missed the idea that information could have a place.

The problem was not RSS

Most information interfaces today are built around a stream.

Social networks are streams. News apps are streams. Many RSS readers are streams.

You scroll.

Something appears, you look at it, and then it moves away as newer information arrives.

Recommendation algorithms make this even more pronounced. They do not simply decide the order of information. They increasingly influence which information enters your field of view at all.

That can be convenient.

But convenience and understanding are not necessarily the same thing.

If I repeatedly see only what a system predicts I am likely to engage with, there is a risk that my view of a subject becomes narrower without me noticing it.

I wanted a different relationship with information.

I wanted to choose the sources myself.

And once I chose them, I wanted them to stay where I put them.

That became Feed Box.

I wanted a place, not another timeline

Feed Box started as an attempt to reconstruct something I had lost with iGoogle: a browser homepage made from information sources I had deliberately selected.

The basic interface is intentionally simple.

There are three columns.

Each source occupies a box.

The boxes stay where I put them.

New articles do not cause a source to move upward. A large unread count does not make it more important. A fetch error does not promote it to the top of the page.

The state of the information can change.

Its location does not.

This distinction became much more important to me than I initially expected.

I began thinking about the interface less like a feed and more like a desk, a bookshelf, or a map.

A bookshelf can extend beyond what I can see at once. That does not prevent me from knowing approximately where a book is.

Scrolling is not necessarily what destroys spatial memory.

Reordering does.

If the same source is usually in the same part of the page, I gradually stop searching for it. I simply look there.

That is why Feed Box deliberately avoids automatically rearranging information according to what is new, popular, unread, or supposedly important.

The system reports state.

It does not decide priority for me.

Density is not the enemy

This also explains why Feed Box looks unusually dense compared with many contemporary web interfaces.

I did not want large cards, generous whitespace, thumbnails, article summaries, or decorative surfaces around every piece of information.

I wanted to see many sources at once.

For this kind of interface, density is not a defect that needs to be corrected. Density is part of the function.

The challenge is not to reduce the amount of information.

It is to give dense information enough structure that I can understand it quickly.

This is one reason I kept thinking back to iGoogle.

It was not beautiful according to current interface conventions.

But it understood something that many modern dashboards seem to have forgotten: a homepage can be an information surface rather than a sequence of cards competing for attention.

Reading is not the end of information

There was another problem I wanted to solve.

Finding something useful is not the same as learning from it.

I can read an interesting article, close the tab, and remember almost nothing about why it mattered a month later.

So I added a direct path from Feed Box to Obsidian.

When I find an article worth keeping, I can send it to my Daily Note. I can also record a short reason for saving it.

That small field matters to me.

The URL tells me what I saved.

The reason tells me why I thought it mattered at that moment.

The workflow becomes:

Observe.

Choose.

Save.

Connect.

Feed Box is where information remains in motion. Obsidian is where selected information can begin to accumulate context.

Over time, one observation can connect to another. Something I saved about software design can later connect to something about photography, AI, information architecture, or my own development work.

The value is not simply that I have archived two articles.

The value is that I can eventually see a relationship between them.

This is also why I do not want Feed Box to summarize everything for me.

The act of deciding what matters is part of the work.

A homepage can show more than news

Once I understood Feed Box as a place rather than an RSS reader, other widgets started to make sense.

I added a small NEXT widget.

It is deliberately not a task manager.

There are no projects, deadlines, tags, recurring tasks, notifications, or productivity systems.

It answers one question:

What am I doing next?

I found this unexpectedly useful. I can leave a short note about where I stopped working and see it immediately the next time I open my browser.

Then I added world clocks and exchange rates.

I added LIVE WINDOW, a fixed observation point streamed through live video.

And I added TIME.

TIME shows things that normal productivity dashboards rarely treat as useful information: the date, the Japanese era, the position of the sun, progress through the year, and the distance to a future date.

These are not notifications.

They do not demand action.

They simply tell me where I am.

That distinction became important.

A great deal of software is designed around events that require a response: a message arrived, a task went overdue, a price changed, somebody posted something.

But the world also contains information that does not demand anything from me.

The sun has a position.

The year has progressed by a certain amount.

It is morning somewhere else.

A live camera is still looking at the same place.

Sometimes I just want my homepage to show me that.

The empty space did not need another widget

As the interface developed, another strange question appeared.

What should I do with the remaining empty space?

The obvious answer in dashboard design is to put more information there.

I decided not to.

Instead, I put a Resident there.

The Resident does almost nothing.

It occupies unused space. It occasionally moves. It can react to a few states, but it does not cover information or demand attention. Its movement is deliberately infrequent.

It has no productivity value.

That is precisely why I wanted it.

Information density and filling every available pixel with information are not the same thing.

A real desk can contain documents, tools, notes, and screens while still having a small plant sitting between them.

The plant does not improve the information architecture.

But it changes the character of the place.

That was the role I wanted the Resident to have.

Feed Box is supposed to be somewhere I return to every day.

A place can contain things that do not need to justify themselves as data.

Rebuilding my homepage

Looking back, I think this is why I remained an iGoogle refugee for so long.

I was searching for a replacement product.

What I actually missed was a model of information.

I did not want an algorithmically optimized stream.

I did not want another infinite list.

I did not want a dashboard that decided what deserved my attention.

I wanted a stable surface where I could choose my own sources, remember where they were, notice what had changed, and decide for myself what was worth carrying forward.

RSS happens to be useful for that.

Obsidian happens to be useful for what comes afterward.

World clocks, sunlight, live windows, and a tiny Resident happen to make that surface feel more like my own place.

Feed Box is the result.

It is not an attempt to recreate iGoogle exactly.

It is an attempt to recover something I think disappeared with it:

the idea that the browser homepage can belong to the person using it.

See Feed Box →