I am inspired by Andy’s venture to create a local startpage in his browser. It makes so much sense.

  • It is a local page on your own computer, so it’s blazing fast
  • There is no tracking on this page
  • The page is under your control, you can make of it whatever you want
  • It works in any browser.

The past couple of years I’ve dabbled a bit in Emacs. I try to learn this ancient yet modern system. Especially orgmode and the extensive config rabbit holes. Like agenda en todos en journal. Last week I decided Emacs is a hobby. I just want to tinker and play with it. I don’t have a grand vision how Emacs might replace Obsidian, Things and Day One for me in my daily work and life. It’s like repairing an oldtimer in your garage in the weekends. You still have your regular car and maybe one day you’ll take some rides with the oldtimers. But it’s not a vehicle to rely on for your daily commute. This decision allows me to play and fool around with it. To learn how such a system work. Just for the joy of it.

Andy’s blogpost all of a sudden gave me a project for Emacs. I use start.me as a service for my own startpage since 2020 or so. It just works, it’s great. I once had a short discussion on Mastodon to make my own startpage with some framework but I never got around to actually do this. The service from Start.me is great, but I only use the bookmarks. I never look at the weather or any other advanced widget. I have a categorized bookmarks and 2 RSS feeds with news. That’s it. That might be something I can build myself, based on orgmode and export to HTML. Orgmode has built-in support to store bookmarks, tags, categories. I don’t change the bookmarks that often so it’s more than OK to have those in an org-file and export to local HTML when changed. The biggest challenge is the HTML to show the bookmarks in columns and cards. But I’m not in a hurry. I can figure this out.

I’ll try to keep a log from the garage here on this project.