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)

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)

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)

A big thank you to everybody who emailed us feedback on the new start page Preview. Since we began promoting the Preview to a group of current start page users a few weeks ago, we've had almost a thousand comments land in our inboxes. The whole team greatly appreciates your feedback.

So far, the two most frequently asked questions have been "How do I get back to my old start page?" and "When can I start using the new start page?"

When we first launched the Preview, we set things up so that when you clicked the promotion to try the new Preview, your original start page would begin redirecting to the new Preview version. In other words, when you went to your start page, you would see the new version, not the old version.

Our thinking here was to set things up so that you could try the new start page without resetting your browser start page. We included a "Return to Old Start Page" link so that anybody who didn't want to start using the Preview version could get back to the existing start page.

A lot of you weren't expecting this automatic redirect, so we changed the set-up. Now, when you click the promotion from the classic start page, the new Preview start page opens in a new browser window. This way, you can easily switch back and forth between the existing start page and the new Preview start page.

If you are still being redirected -- that is, you see the new Preview start page come up when you go to my.earthlink.net, instead of your old start page -- it's simple to switch back. Click the "Return to Old Start Page" link, in the top right above the page, just above the big blue Search button. This will turn off the redirect from my.earthlink.net to preview.my.earthlink.net.

For all of you who want to know when they can start using the new version, the answer is "right now!" We are still actively working on the new start page and will be steadily adding new features, but it is now ready for permanent users. Just click on the "Click here to make myEarthLink Preview your new personal start page" message, near the top of the page, just below Weather and just above Email Preview.

Clicking on this link will redirect my.earthlink.net to preview.earthlink.net. So, if my.earthlink.net usually comes up whenever you open up your Internet Browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.), the new version of the start page will start coming up instead of the old version. You don't need to download anything or adjust anything in Total Access. Just click the link on the new start page, and you should be all set. If you change your mind later, you can click "Return to Old Start Page" to get the old start page back.

If you want to use both the old and the new start page at the same time, you can add http://preview.my.earthlink.net as a browser favorite/bookmark and continue to go to my.earthlink.net when you bring up your Web browser.

Thanks again for the helpful comments. Keep 'em coming!

Posted by at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)