Customizing spaces

(Slightly elaborating from my reply on the 32-Bit Cafe.)

Bekah’s entry for this month’s IndieWeb carnival is a great deep dive on “skinning” (as in, WinAmp skins) that unearthed many memories I forgot I had!

I remember discovering the Zune theme for Windows XP—really the only alt skin they had, sort of a consolation prize for all the customizability taken away relative to Win 2000—and obsessively switching over all the computers in our school library to use it. It is kind of ironic that will all the “improvement” that has happened in the software development world since then—esp. popularizing the notion that everything should be a modular and separate code from data—our desktop environments have become more monolithic and their designs dictated from on high.

Bekah’s idea of the browser start page as a modern approximation of that spirit is also very insightful. It made me think about how much time I spent in my browser nowadays and how little time I spend looking at the blank desktop. In the past I obsessively tricked my desktop out with widgets and a cool wallpaper but now I’m like, do I even have any files there lol. Well, that’s a slight lie: When I first got my own apartment, I decided to be indulgent and set my desktop background to a slideshow of attractive models (because it’s my space and nobody can tell me what to do), and now I still have that slideshow and can Ctrl+D to see it when bored, but for the most part I usually have 2 to 4 maximized windows in the way.

Right now, my browser start page is nothing special, but I’d like to get around with fiddling with one of those cool self-hosted homepage things and have it show me something useful/fun like stats about my home network or RSS feed headlines or whether my automated backups are working.