A few years ago everyone talked about building portals. The idea was that people would use them as a launching point to the rest of the web. Think Yahoo!, MSN, etc. These large sites provided enormous home pages covered with news, weather, stocks and searches. They tried to be everything to everyone.

Enter the personal homepage. Now Google has it, Microsoft has it, Yahoo has it. Basically the idea is to provide every person with a customizable start page for the web. For you, it can include the latest news about Harry Potter, local traffic information or the current value of Chipotle's stock. It's like a funnel for the vastness of the web.

Personalized Home Pages is a growing and very competitive market. They're basically repositories for Web information, gadgets and widgets. The difference from old-style web portals is that the user can personalize them much more (with RSS, inline email, etc), the content is greatly enhanced, interactive and potentially more useful. They can be collaborative, and use Ajax to make it more of a desktop-like experience and you can create a custom homepage completely free; add links, pictures and other content such as calendars, games and other widgets to your very own personalized web page.

Startpages engines such as Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo! and Windows Live Personalized Experience are even available in many localized versions. To see a review of the most popular services, check this post.

Get your daily Green Fix

I routinely browse a number of blogs, news services and related resources regarding my Green Interests. I'm sure we all have the same daily routine of checking our email; read our favorite blogs, maybe check the local news, etc. spending quite some time jumping among these websites. In order to make this chore easier, I decided to build a custom homepage to have all my info available in one single place.

After spending an afternoon researching the available options for custom homepage creation, I settled on Netvibes , which is without question the one to beat. Its customization is practically unrivaled. Not only that, it also provides social functionality by sharing modules with others and could be your one stop solution to finding all your information on the internet.

It is very easy to create a personal homepage with Netvibes and I had a working version within hours. You have themes, tabs and thousands of widgets available, and can use your own backgrounds and graphics for header. I even made a couple of custom widgets such as one for custom Green Search and others to display my own content.

To create your custom homepage, just follow these simple steps:

• Register at Netvibes.com. It free, fast and easy.
• Give your homepage a title
• Change your language or design theme and optionally add a background graphics.
• Add tabs to classify your content
• Add content (Blogs, news, online videos, podcast, pictures, e-mail, calendar, to-d- lists, etc.) using the thousands (more than 100,000 according to their website!) of widgets available.
• You can make your homepage private or public.

The Holy Grail: Monetize

Taking matters a step further, you can share these custom homepages with the world and maybe monetize the traffic if you can get enough eyeballs. Netvibes "Universes" are customized versions of homepages that are available for public access.

Since I'm sure a lot of people share my environmental concerns, I decided to register a domain name (MyGreenFeeds.com), make the custom homepage publicly available under this, drop a couple of widgets for Google Adsense and affiliate links and see if I could earn some money on the process as well.

I used several tabs to organize my feeds. One for the main blogs I visit, one for Environmental news from the major sources, one for Green tips and even one for Green Humor.

This is a work in progress so the available content can changed depending on visitors' feedbacks. Customized tabs, feeds, podcasts, events, videos and modules can be shared with others individually or via the Netvibes Ecosystem, which is a collection of user submitted modules/widgets built using their Universal Widget API (UWA). For privacy reasons, only modules with publicly available content can be shared.