After you log in, you’re ready to start customizing your personal My Yahoo! page. Yahoo! offers some starter packages of interest, such as News, Sports, Money, Health, a Basics package, and Entertainment. We chose a few by clicking their checkboxes and then Create My Page.

Based on our personal information and choices, Yahoo! filled in a long page with local weather, world news, and odds and ends it thought we might like. Some content modules were pretty disposable, such as the ones with horoscopes and lame jokes. Other inclusions were inexplicable, such as the Garfield and Doonesbury comic strips. (Is there anyone in the world who enjoys both?)

Our page was laid out with a wide, horizontal column of modules on the left and a narrow stack of vertical modules on the right. Some of the latter included Weather, Maps, Stock Portfolios, and News Photos. Near the top was a handy field for Yahoo! Search. And when we saw that there was even a preview panel for our Yahoo! Mail account, we knew we were on to something good.

Change Your Page

Fortunately, we could change the things we didn’t like. For example, you can banish a module from your My Yahoo! page by clicking its X button. You can now drag and drop modules within their types of columns (wide or narrow) in most browsers, a recent and welcome change. Some things to remember are that you need to click the Finished or Done button to save most changes you make, and if My Yahoo! mutely refuses to make a change, it’s probably trying to set a cookie that your browser or cookie blocker is refusing.

To tweak a module, click its Edit button and then select Edit Content from the menu that appears. For instance, you can choose various cities you travel to in the Weather box or up to three comic strips in the Comics module. Click Finished when you’ve made your selections. We found that we didn’t always return to My Yahoo! after making changes to some modules, so we sometimes had to click the My Yahoo! link at the top of the page.

Certain modules, such as Stock Portfolios, deserve some study. Click the Edit link next to Quotes. Here you can select different stocks, indices, and mutual funds to watch. If an item isn’t listed in the checklist of Example Market Indices in Step 2: Ticker Symbols, click the Look Up or Alphabetical Listing link on the right. If you search through Look Up, you’ll need to specify the Type of item, such as Mutual Funds. Find the fund, index, or stock you want to track, such as INTC, and then click Add. Note that in the Quotes Edit page, you can erase or add stock ticker symbols directly in the Symbols box, if you like.

Edit. If you want to move a module on the My Yahoo! page so you can see it without scrolling very far, click its Edit button and choose Move Up, Move To Top, Move Down, or Move To Bottom. There’s a quicker way to do this in the Change Layout section below. And, no, there’s no way to move the top banner ad to a less prominent spot, but ad support keeps My Yahoo! free to use.

The last item on the Edit menu is Email This Module, which works through an online form and your Yahoo! Mail account, if you have one. We generally tend to avoid these “mail to a friend” forms because we don’t like giving out our friends’ email addresses to potential spammers, but Yahoo! states on the page that it doesn’t collect or use said addresses for any marketing purposes. Anyway, the oddly phrased Copy Yourself box simply means send a copy of the email to your Yahoo! Mail account.

Add Content. Click this button at the top left of the My Yahoo! page to add modules of content from Web sites that offer RSS feeds. If one of your favorite sites doesn’t do RSS yet, email its Webmaster and request it.

Type a keyword or phrase, such as DVD releases, in the Find Content field. Yahoo! will locate related feeds. Click the Add button next to any feed you want to subscribe to. You can preview the types of headlines in a feed by clicking its name or the Preview icon next to it. A diagram on the left will show you where the new module will appear on your My Yahoo! page.

Alternatively, you can use the Add RSS By URL link just to the right of the Find Content field, which is a more roundabout method. Occasionally you’ll find a Web site you like, and you’ll want to add its RSS feed to your My Yahoo! page. If it has a button labeled + My Yahoo!, all you need to do is click it and then Add To My Yahoo! to add the feed. Other sites may have RSS buttons labeled XML or Atom, depending on their types of feeds; Yahoo supports these, too. Whatever its label, click the RSS button or link. This will probably take you to a page of XML Web markup language. Copy the URL at the top of the page, such as news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&gl=us&output=rss for Google News, by right-clicking it and choosing Copy. Next, from your My Yahoo! page, click Add Content and Add RSS By URL. Right-click the URL field, choose Paste, and press ENTER to add the feed.

Finally, you can choose a category in the Browse By Topic section of the Add Content page to find an RSS feed you like. For instance, under Yahoo! Services, there’s a Package Tracker for UPS and a few other shipping services, and Voicemail access from Yahoo! Mobile.

Change Layout. By default, My Yahoo! has a wide column on the left and a narrow one on the right. Click the Change Layout link at the top left of the page if you want to adjust the way the page is arranged. Change Layout also gives you a much easier way to move content modules up and down the page than do their individual Edit menus. Select a module in the Wide or Narrow Column lists and then use the arrow icons to raise or lower it.

The X icons remove modules, but at this writing, there’s no corresponding Add icon in case you make a mistake and delete the wrong one. If you err, click the My Yahoo! link at the top of the page and then Change Layout to start over. Change Layout won’t save your alterations until you click Finished, so consider this an “undo” workaround.

You can swap the Wide and Narrow columns’ positions with the Move Column buttons and add a third column using the Layout options below. You can also change the location of the Yahoo! Search field from the top of the page to the bottom, as well as tell My Yahoo! how to behave when you add or delete content modules.

The Reading Filter setting at the bottom of the page doesn’t censor offensive words, as you might guess. Instead, it’s an on/off switch for the Hide Read Items and Show features described below.

Change Colors. Actually, this link (next to Change Layout) might be better named Change Themes. You can redecorate your My Yahoo! page here with colors and patterns in prefabricated themes such as Hello Kitty or ’70s Necktie. If you only want to tweak the colors of My Yahoo!’s background, borders, and text, click Customize Theme in the Current Theme box in the top left of the Change Colors page.

Show. The Show menu, at the top right of the My Yahoo! page, lets you tell My Yahoo! to display recent headlines that have appeared within a certain period of time, whether that means the last 15 minutes or since the beginning of the day. The default setting is All Items.

Note that this setting only applies to the current session of My Yahoo!. If you want to permanently set a module to show items from a particular time frame, right-click its Edit button, click Edit Content, and adjust the Display settings.

Hide Read Items. Check this box if you want headlines to disappear after you click them. This can really keep your My Yahoo! page uncluttered, as you’ll only see the items you haven’t read yet.

My Page/Add New Page. There’s so much great stuff you can pack into a My Yahoo! page, but only so much room to view it all without having to scroll downward. But hey—you can make more than one page with the Add New Page link next to Hide Read Items. For instance, you might create separate My Yahoo! pages for work and relaxation, with news and the Package Tracker on the first and movie times and TV listings on the second. After you create two or more pages, the Edit menu on each module will have Move To (Your Other) Page options.

The Refresh Rate menu lets you tell My Yahoo! how often to update itself with fresh content, as available. Note that the default is Never, so you'll see the same headlines until you revisit the page's URL or bookmark or you click your browser's Refresh button. Oddly, you won’t see the Refresh Rate menu until you’ve created at least one additional page in My Yahoo!.

My Yahoo! Tricks

We’ve just begun to scratch the surface of what My Yahoo! can offer. For example, the TV listings let you choose among your own cable provider’s channels and even figure out when a show will air again through the Search feature.

Another trick is to import your browser’s Bookmarks or Favorites into a content module, although this can take up a lot of space. Follow your browser’s directions to export your bookmarks to an HTML file. Next, after logging in to My Yahoo!, surf to bookmarks.yahoo.com. Click Import Bookmarks and then the type of browser closest to the one you use. (Choose Netscape for Firefox, Mozilla, and the like.) Browse to the HTML file you made and click Import Bookmarks. Next, go to My Yahoo! and click Add Content. Type bookmarks into the Find Content field and then Add The Bookmarks From Yahoo! Bookmarks module in the list that appears. You can collapse bookmark folders to save space by clicking their triangle-shaped icons.

The more you explore My Yahoo!, the more you find . . . and the better your personal page becomes. And if you’ve already been looking for decent RSS reader software, consider this: You don’t have to install anything to use My Yahoo!; it’s free; and you can access it from anywhere. That’s something to holler “Yahoo!” about.

by Marty Sems