myEarthLink Portal Product Blog

Web Mail users may have noticed that clicking the Sign Out link now directs you to the myEarthLink start page. If you're a myEarthLink user, you'll go to your personalized page. If you're not a myEarthLink user, you'll see the signed-out version of the start page.

The idea is to send you to a useful landing page, with weather, news headlines, favorite sites and such, so it's simpler to jump to whatever you want to do next. But if you prefer to go directly to the simple Web Mail sign-in page, it's easy to make the change.

Here's what you do:

• Log in to WebMail, and click the "Preferences" link in the right-hand column
• Click "Web Mail Options" under "Other Preferences"
• Scroll down to "Sign-out Destination" at the bottom of the screen
• Select "Web Mail sign-in page"
• Click the "Save" button at the bottom of the page

For a heaping helping of other Web Mail tips, check out the Web Mail blog, from our resident Email Guy, John Foltz.

Posted by at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One common criticism of the classic start page is it takes some work to actually get started using it. When you arrive at the old start page and click to register, you end up going through three screens before you get back to the start page.

With the new myEarthLink, we wanted to speed the process up. So, last week, we launched a streamlined registration service, known affectionately among the team as "inline reg."

The basic idea of inline reg is pretty simple: Instead of going to a separate page to sign up for a new account, you can take care of everything directly from the start page. You work through this simple form, enter a security code to verify you're a human, and you're done!

In last week's release, we launched inline reg on a separate log-in screen, since we haven't yet released a version of the page that users without an account can see. We'll be launching this "signed-out" version of the page in the next few weeks.

Posted by at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If there's something on your start page that bugs you, I have some good news. With today's release, you can now remove any of the features on the middle of the page (Email Preview, News & Updates, Entertainment and Shopping). If you change your mind, it's easy to add everything back again later.

To give one of these features the boot, mouse over the upper right-hand corner of the box. A trash can icon will show up. Click on the trash can, and the feature will vanish.

For example, if you wanted to remove the Entertainment feature, you would click on the trash can here:

After you click the trash can, Entertainment will disappear and a new link ("Entertainment") will appear at the bottom of the page, under the text "More myEarthLink Features (Click to add)." To add the feature to your page again, you would simply click on the word "Entertainment."

Note that you can also remove any of the sites in the Favorite Sites list on the left side of the page. This has been in place since we launched, but I've heard from a few of you who weren't sure how to got about removing a site. To ax something in this area, click "customize" at the top or bottom of the Favorite Sites box. You'll see a trash can icon next to every one of the sites.

Click the trash can next to a site to remove it from your list.

At this point, you can't chuck the features in the dock at the top of the page (weather, stocks, reminders, sports scores and internet security). But rest assured, we are planning to make these features removable as well, later this summer.

Posted by at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

You'll see some changes on the new start page today. It's easy to miss one of the big ones, but it certainly means a lot to the portal team: after two months, we've removed the Preview label.

But what does this mean, other than a tweaked header?

Simply put, we've declared the page "ready for prime time." We feel that the start page is in good shape for you to use everyday, as a replacement for the old start page.

A few key factors went into this decision:

1. The new start page is stable. The two months of the Preview phase surfaced the major hiccups, and we've addressed them. Our expectation is that you can count on the new start page working well consistently, and that should be your expectation too. (If you do see problems, please email us to let us know).

2. We've had a good bit of time to hear from real, live, objective, opinionated users, which has helped us honestly evaluate what we've built. Many, many thanks to all of you who put the start page through its paces during the Preview phase and reported your impressions back to us. You've detailed your likes, dislikes, desires and expectations, and collectively, that feedback has been an extremely thorough report card. Keep it coming.

3. The core features are in place. There's much more coming down the pipe, but we feel that the start page has the functionality it needs to leave the Preview tag behind.

The major functionality addition that pushed us over the line was version 2 of the "News and Updates" feature. In the Preview stage, this area consisted of AP headlines from the myEarthLink news channel. In the new version, you can add local headlines, as on the classic start page, plus headlines from just about any major news source or blog you want. Check out this post to learn all about it.

We're excited to to graduate the start page from Preview, and we hope you're excited about the new tools. We are continuing to tweak the page and add features regularly, but at this point, the new page is ready for you. If you haven't already, we heartily encourage you to switch over.

You can make the switch by clicking the button that says "Click here to make the new myEarthLink your personal start page," just below the Stocks button. This will redirect the URL for your old start page, so that the new start page comes up automatically.

Posted by at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

When it comes to news, it's clear that one size doesn't fit all, at least not perfectly. Many of you have asked to add specific national news sources to your start page, and just about everybody is eager to see what's going on in their own neighborhood. For a lot you, a big part of a start page being truly personalized is seeing content from the sources you like, about the subjects you're interested in.

If this sounds like you, I have some very good news. Today we launched a new version of the News area that lets you include just about any type of news you like.

[Note: We are rolling this feature out to users gradually over the course of the day. If you don't see the new version right now, please try again later. ]

When you first load up the start page, you'll still see AP news stories from the myEarthLink News Channel. But if you click the "Add/Edit Sources" link at the bottom left of the news area, you can fill up the 12 tabs with whatever you're interested in. Among other things, you can add:

- Headlines from a big national news provider, such as CNN on NPR
- New posts from leading blogs, such as Technorati or BoingBoing.
- Posts from a friend's personal blog
- Headlines about your hometown
- New posts from a variety of sources about a specific subject you're following

The only requirement is that the news provider has set up an RSS feed. RSS is a standard delivery system for Web content updates (such as news articles or blog posts), and most news providers, blogs and other major content Web sites have set up feeds. (If you want to learn more about how this works, check out Dave's introduction to RSS on Earthling or this handy video guide from CommonCraft.

Continue reading "Choose Your News" »

Posted by at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (33)

We launched a new release of the Preview start page last night, with a big addition. Now you can reorder all the content in the middle of the page. For example, if you want news at the top of the page and your email preview at the bottom of the page, you can easily switch them around.

To drag a content box, click on the up/down arrow icon in the upper right corner of the box.

Hold down your mouse button, and drag the box up or down on the page. When you release your mouse button, the content box will land wherever you drop it.

If you're using Internet Explorer 7, you may run into a bug where two content boxes end up overlapping after you do some reordering. We're working on a fix for this one. In the meantime, you can get rid of the overlap by clicking the refresh button in your browser or clicking between tabs in one of the overlapping content boxes.

Posted by at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

At the end of last week, our development team deployed a fix to address the server error issues a lot of you have been seeing.

After some keen detective work, the team zeroed in on issues related to connections from the start page to our database. The database is where we store all your personal settings, such as favorite stocks and cities you're tracking with the weather alert feature. The fix involved clearing up bugs in how the start page pulls from this database.

After hitting the page and every feature again and again all week, we're very happy to stamp "fixed" on this issue. But please let us know if you do hit a server error. You can post on this blog, or email us.

We are addressing a separate issue with the email preview feature. You may see this message when you come to the start page:

In the meantime, if you run into this issue, you can usually fix the problem by clicking the "Edit" link at the top of the email preview feature.

Posted by at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)