I've been working on some significant changes to my personal homepage for the first time since, oh, 2003(?). You can see the new version of the top page at this secret URL.

The new page reflects the realities of the Web 2.0 era, where (unlike when I last worked on my homepage) most of my content is hosted elsewhere, and my homepage now simply aggregates it all in one place. Think of it as a portal in reverse: instead of me going out to the world, it's where the world looks into me.

Now, this isn't radical or new by any stretch of the imagination, but ironically enough, it's something I spent 3 years at Yahoo! trying to do for everybody while my own site stagnated in neglect. I first did a hack back in the fall of 2005 to make it easier to pull in external content into a Yahoo! 360 profile. Unfortunate, the PMs didn't see the value in that then. I got another chance at it last year while working on Mash, and came pretty close to realizing the idea, but Mash was put on hold a few weeks after the beta launch. The underlying module architecture did live on, however, and was used to power SearchMonkey, and was also subsumed into (and subsequently largely removed from) the Yahoo! Application Platform (which has yet to launch).

So, I finally decided it was time to give up trying to do the world a favor, and just do it for myself. Except, like they say, the third time is the charm; I managed to do it better than my previous attempts. With my homepage,I found an approach that provides both vitality and efficiency: the page aggregates content from 5 sources (for now) and updates should show up within 15 minutes, but the page also generates in 300ms (on 4 year old low-end hardware, PHP 4.3 without APC, and file-based object caching instead of memcache).