I get some of the neatest webtoy news from Sarah. One of her del.icio.us links for the week was for Protopage. Protopage is a Web 2.0 home page, ala Google or Yahoo's customizable home pages. I've never gotten much into those, but found Protopage captivating.

On the top right of the page is a search box. The search box shows whether you're logged in or not and can include as many or as few search engines as you like - and their list is very, very long. Mine here as Google, Google News, Dictionary.com, Torrentspy, and Medscape, just to list a few. You can also add your own (I plan on switching out Dictionary.com for Onelook.com).

Once logged in you can create seemingly unlimited categories and tabs, both public and private.

In the image below, my "home" tab, I'm using three email widgets, one checking my POP account, and two checking my two Gmail accounts. There are three RSS feed widgets, the Lion Brand newsletter, daily quotes, and Shawn's journal.

The remaining four boxes are Protopage widgets - a clock, a calendar (the circles are dates with information attached - like the 21st is our anniversary, the 13th my surgery), Protopuppy, and the weather.

I really like the way RSS feeds work. You can choose how many entries to show, whether there should be just titles, or titles and excerpts, and you can add several feeds to a single widget (like I have several feeds from TBO, and friends who have multiple blogs). When you click a title a screen pops up (second image below) giving you the rest of the feed, along with the other feeds within that tab, with links to the post.

You can also have thumbnail feeds, where Protopage strips all of the feed except the thumbnails. Clicking the thumbnail brings up the feed screen the way clicking a title does in text feeds. Or you can set it to show a single (the last) photo from the feed.

Did I mention they also have podcast and videocast widgets? I'm not using these myself, but video and audio RSS feeds also have a good home here.

But my absolute favorite feature is the To-Do list widget.

Oooooooooooooooo.

Additionally there's a Google Maps widget I'm not using (yet), both plain text and HTML/rich text sticky notes, and a photo upload widget that I'll probably use to keep track of knitting projects. In fact, I'm thinking of adding a public category for all my yarn-related bits.

I really love this site. It's my kind of organization.