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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you go to preview.my.earthlink.net, the page may fail to load. Instead, you see a server error message, like this:

When the page does load, individual features on the page may fail to load. For example, when you click on the Stocks button in the alert dock, you might see this:

Our development team is working on the problem now, and we hope to have it corrected soon.

In the meantime, you can usually get the page and individual features working by reloading the page. Click the refresh button in your Web browser toolbar, or just type in "http://preview.my.earthlink.net"

I appreciate your patience as we work through these issues.

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!

If you haven't checked out the new myEarthLink yet, click here to get the Preview. If you're logged on to the classic myEarthLink, your preferences should automatically transfer over to the new version. If you're logged out, you'll be able to log in with your existing username and password. If you're new to myEarthLink, you can set up a free user account here.

I know the first question for a lot of current myEarthLink users will be, "Why are you building a new start page in the first place?" In a nutshell, our mission is to make myEarthLink lighter, more adaptable and more intuitive. The primary feedback we get on the classic myEarthLink is that it feels cluttered. Our focus throughout the development process has been attacking this clutter, mainly by approaching the basic structure of the page in a radically different way.

If you turn on all the features on the classic start page, you end up with a very full plate. There are many useful things on the page, but it can take some time to find what you're looking for. And as you jump between features, you interact with each in a slightly different way. It's easy to feel overwhelmed.

In the new myEarthLink, we've addressed this problem in two major ways: First, we've grouped similar features into distinct areas. Second, we've built the page so that it surfaces content and functionality when you need it and then automatically hides it again when you don't need it.