[Techtalk] Setting a homepage only at first startup of browser(Opera)

Magni Onsoien magnio+lc-techtalk at pvv.ntnu.no
Wed Aug 11 15:56:56 EST 2004


On 2004-08-11 08:47:45 -0500, Tracey Clark said:
> And it was said by Magni Onsoien-->
> > I don't mind having the
> > intranet as my first page when I start the browser (hence "start page"),
> > but when I push the "home"-button, I want my personal link page to come
> > up.
> 
> Whether they call it the "start page" or not, it is what Opera refers to
> as the "home page", which is set in the Preferences. The Home button will
> take you to whatever is set as the Home Page.

Yes, *I* know that, and that's why i make the distinction between start-
and homepage. I don't want to change the homepage, since I have my
useful links there, but since this is soon to be a directive from the
info people, I'd like to simply start opera with the appropriate page,
and then ignore it for my own personal homepage.

(A sidenote is that I am admin for the central systems, including a
bunch of student labs, and we'll have to do something about them. i find
it kind of offending to change personal settings for existing students,
but I don't have a problem with setting a general policy or setting for
NEW users.)

> My first question would be - if you manually changes your Home Page, does
> it automatically revert to their "intranet start page"? (They can set
> network scripts to automatically change that setting). If you can
> manually change it, you can do so.

Yes, but then I am not following what my boss and the info dept have
said. If I start the browser with an appropriate startpage, I do what
they tell me to.

> If your home page choice is automatically overwritten with their home
> page choice, you could make a script that would call Opera from the
> command line to open the page you want, as was suggested. Unfortunatly,
> I'm not conversant enough with Opera to tell you what the command line
> command would be. It may be as simple as:
> $>opera www.myhomepage.com
> (with "myhomepage" being whatever site you want to open)

Yes, it's the right thing. I came to think of this minutes after sending
my initial mail :)

So problem is basically solved now, I want to make a wrapper that starts
opera (or any browser) with the intranet page as argument, and new users
will have the intranet as default homepage. Those who want to change it
to something else, are free to do that.

For Windows, I'll let the Windows guys think of something smart. They
can make a general policy that overrides whatever Homepage people set at
login/out, but I hope they have the possibility of some wrapper or an
argument as in Unix. 

(I don't want a hypersecure solution. I'd rather want something that
make the info people happy - "look, this is the start page!" - and then
people can do what they want to. I have my personal link page which I am
happy with, and I still use the intranet several times a day. Other
users may be happy with the intranet's possibilities of personal
content, but to me the small link box I can have there is not good
enough since I am used to something else.)



Magni (rebellion?) :)
-- 
sash is very good for you.


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