browserStartpage

Are you switching browsers often? Are you tired, that every browser uses it's own speed dial, and you can't import that in your new browser? The solution: host your own speed dial! This is especially useful if you need/want to share a bunch of links with friends or colleagues.

browserStartpage is a speed dial, you can host on your own webserver. You can configure your content using a JSON-file. I made it themeable as well, so every part of it can be changed to your liking.

Thanks to the many possibilities to store and show links, you no longer have to synchronize your bookmarks in different browsers.

Features #

• easily configure everything using JSON
• completely themeable (including background images)
• open a collection of links in a modal (typical use cases are several environments of systems)
• add an additional sidebar for even more bookmarks
• host it on your own server

Why I built this #

Many links accumulate on my computers both professionally and privately. Be it various links to systems, backends or developer sites, in the end the bookmarks bar was always overcrowded and unwieldy. I therefore developed a start page that I could maintain via an XML file. That page was hosted on an in-house system and became very popular over the years that it has been set up as the default home page on all the company's new computers. It was pretty ugly but very useful, so I added some themes. I was never quite happy with it, and I demanded to add new features. Finally, I decided to build a new version as a side project in my spare time.

If you want to know more about the development, you can read this blogpost.

What were my goals at that time? #

The page should provide a simple sidebar for various links and of course it should get built in a responsive way. The most important thing were the tiles, which should give me quick access to the most important links. The links should be able to be divided into different categories.

Equipped with these basic functionality, I published the page on Github.

I received a lot of positive feedback there and since I wanted to use the site professionally too, the requirements have grown so that modal dialogs and theming are now also possible as well.

I hope you'll find this page as useful as I do. :)