Adventure in Aggregating Pages

This week, I have been experimenting with the two different sites that were mentioned in this week's lesson on Aggregating Pages. The first site that I tried was Netvibes. While I like the look of some of the widgets on this site and I think that I was able to get everything that I needed to have linked to it, I did not find the site as user friendly as Protopage. With Protopage, I was able to easily established the look that I was wanting for my dashboard and adding widgets to the pages was a very simple process. This site seems to give the user a bit more creative freedom when it comes to designing the look of the page. I did have a bit of trouble when it came to adding my YouTube channel with my playlist. At first, I was not sure how to add it with embedded codes for the videos, so I simply added a link that will open to my playlist. After posting my dilemma to the discussion page and searching online resources for more information, I was finally able to figure out how to get the videos to appear and play from the Protopage website. This is something that I had not done before, but have learned a little more about through this process. During the week, I have experimented with different widgets on the site and while some were easy to use, others did not work like I anticipated they would. I was able to add the videos from my YouTube playlist, as well as a link to that page. I also added a link to my ePortfolio and my Blog for ETEC 527. In addition to those items, I added links from Twitter and other interesting widgets like news feeds, weather, and a calendar. I like the idea of creating a dashboard site, and Protopage makes the process fairly simple. Here is the link to the page that I created. http://www.protopage.com/shelliharrel