With everything Yahoo! has to offer, it’s not surprising that many users use
Yahoo! as their start page for all their Web travels. While the normal Yahoo!
home page is an okay start page, it’s rather generic. Wouldn’t it be better to cre­
ate your own personal version of Yahoo!, comprised of those services that you
use most every day?
Well, Yahoo! makes it easy to create your own personal Yahoo!. It’s called My
Yahoo!, where you can pick and choose what you see—and what you don’t
see—every time you log on.
My Yahoo! is located at my.yahoo.com. Easy to remember, eh? The first time
you visit My Yahoo!, you must register for the service and customize your page.
After that, each time you go to My Yahoo!, you’ll see your Yahoo! page exactly
as you configured it.
After you’ve signed on, you see the generic My Yahoo! page shown in Figure
1-10. This is an okay page—it gives you an idea of what you can do with My
Yahoo!—but the whole point of using My Yahoo! is to create a customized page,
which you can do quite easily.

My Yahoo! can display a variety of different types of content, each in its own
module. It’s up to you to choose which content modules you want to display. To
select which modules are displayed on your My Yahoo! page, click the Choose
Content button. When the Personalize Page Content page appears, put a check
mark next to each module you want to display and uncheck those topics you
don’t want to display.
Most modules let you customize the content that is displayed within; for example,
you can create your own list of stocks to display in the Portfolios module and
choose what types of news are displayed in the My Front Page Headlines module.
Although the specific customization is different for each module, the general
steps you take are the same. Click the Edit button on the module you want to
customize; when the next page appears, read the instructions carefully and
then make the appropriate choices. This may include selecting or deselecting
topics, choosing how many headlines are displayed, entering stock tickers for
your portfolio, and so on.

After you’ve decided on all your content, you need to arrange that content on
your page. By default, My Yahoo! uses a two-column layout, with the left col­
umn narrower than the right. You can also choose a three-column layout, with a
big center column; just click the Choose Layout button to make your selection.
You can then assign different content modules to different areas of the page.
If you don’t like the default colors of the My Yahoo! page, you can choose from
a variety of other color schemes. Just click the Change Colors button, then
choose from one of the predefined color themes—or click the Customize Theme
link to choose your own colors for each page element.
Your My Yahoo! is now complete—and ready to be changed again whenever
you feel like it!

Some modules—such as the Portfolio and Headlines modules—include a
Detach button that’s not found on other modules. When you click the
Detach button, the contents of that module are displayed in a separate win­
dow on your desktop. This is a great way to display constantly updated
information (such as stock prices) while freeing up your Web browser for
other surfing.