Myfav.es - Myfaves Settings

What is Myfav.es?

Myfav.es is an easy to use start page alternative which helps you quickly access your favorite sites

What's new in Myfav.es?

• More Sites
• Themes
• Icon Customizations
• Accounts / Your own unique myfav.es url
• Homepage Search improvements

Site Problems

Icon links are broken or garbled

In the rare case that your sites don't appear to be linking out properly, don't panic. Head over to the "My Faves" tab and click edit site URLs to edit your icons links. If this still doesn't fix your issue please contact us at support@myfav.es with your username, browser and details about your specific issue.

Settings do not update

If your settings do not update, make sure you have cookies enabled. If you are still having issues please contact us at support@myfav.es with your username, and we'll do our best to reset your account.

How to set up myfaves

Adding icons

Head over to the "all sites" tab and find your favorite sites. Simply click on a site to add it. Don't see your favorite site? You can add a custom icon or suggest a site.

Editing a site's URL

Would you rather go to amazon.co.uk over amazon.com? No problem. Navigate to the "My Faves" tab and click the "edit site urls" link.

Alternatively, you can edit the url on your hompage view in quick edit mode, which is explained next.

Quick Edit Mode

Hovering an icon on your homepage view will bring up a gear icon. Click icon for quick edit mode. Here you can edit the site's url or change the icon color for custom icons.

Note: touch devices must edit urls from the "My Faves" tab.

Changing The Color of Custom icons

You can change the color of a custom icon by going to the "My Faves" tab and clicking "edit sites" or you can do it right from your home page in "quick edit mode." (Described above.)

Editing the Order of your icons

You can reorder your icons the "My Faves" tab. Simply drag the site's name up or down, until its in the desired order.

You can also reorder icons on your homepage (if you have the option turned on in settings.) Simply drag the icon to the new desired location.

Deleting an Icon

You can delete icons in the "My Faves" tab. Simply drag the site's name to the trashcan below the list of sites.

Setting Up your Browser:

Set myfav.es as your browser's default start page

Here's how to set myfav.es as your browsers default start page in:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox - Mac | PC
• Chrome
• Safari
• iPad / iPhone
• Android

Open myfav.es in every new tab:

Many people like myfaves to load up every time they create a new tab. Here's how to do it in:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox
• Chrome
• Safari

Advanced Features:

Fast Mode

Normally when using myfav.es, everytime you load your homepage you must connect to myfav.es to download your page. Even if you already have your page cached the server is still contacted to verify that none of the files have changed.

Fast mode works using HTML5, and offline application cache, to make your homepage load much faster without ever having to contact the server. This means you can use myfav.es without a connection to the internet, and that myfav.es will load as fast as your browser can generate it.

Fast mode is not enabled by default for several reasons.

• Offline applications are powerful, but the manifest, which lists files to store offline, must be regenerated whenever you change your settings. This means that icons you have may temporarily appear out of date because they have not been updated from the server.
• Application changes roll out to offline users slower. Because you may have a slightly older version of the site you may not receive important bug updates as quickly
• There is the slight risk you get stuck with a stale cache that never resets. Because the app cache is swapped with javascript. If the code on the site ever breaks newer versions wont download properly, and you will have to manually clear the offline app cache in your browser

For these reasons we've made fast mode a special feature for power-users. If anything breaks in fast mode, clear your offline app storage, and remember myfav.es can always be viewed normally from your profile url or homepage url.

Fast mode can be accessed at http://myfav.es/fast

Export Settings

Before user accounts existed, we created the export tool to allow anonymous users to export their settings cookie to another compuer. We've kept this feature up for those who, for whatever reason, decide not to take advantage of user accounts

Myfav.es users with accounts won't need to use this tool as their account is stored safely on our servers and can be accessed from any computer

The export tool can be accessed at http://www.myfav.es/export

Google Unread Notifications

Google unread notifications allow you to view your unread google reader count and gmail inbox count from your homepage. To access this feature go to my account and enter your google username and password.

An important note about privacy

First and foremost, we do not store any of your google account data on myfav.es. Your account data is stored encrypted on your computer in cookie form.

Here at myfav.es we just want to make a better homepage for people. We've built myfav.es in our spare times as a project of love. If this feature ends up causing issues with users, we respect their opinion and will get rid of it.

For those technical minded, here's a background on the technologies and how we implemented this feature

Google provides two ways to access unread notifications:

The first method is through IMAP/OAuth, which requires you logging into google, authorize myfav.es to read your inbox, and then myfav.es can connect to your inbox like a mail server.

There are several reasons why we consider this route to be overkill.

• We don't want to have access to your inbox, that's too much, we just want to tell you the number of unread messages.
• IMAP would slow down the speed of your homepage, and would require a fair amount of server side parsing

The second method for accessing gmail is through an authenticated ATOM RSS feed. Myfav.es uses your unread message ATOM feed because its fast and doesn't require us having access to your inbox. This is the same methodology google uses for its own google unread notification reader chrome extension. When you enter your google authentication data, it is stored on your computer in cookie form. We use some fairly heavy 256bit encryption, and we dont store ANY data on our servers. When you make a request to read your inbox the request is proxied through our servers. The servers receive your encrypted authentication data and pass on the request to google. No logs are stored of this.

The reason we have to proxy the request is that it's a security restriction browsers place on websites that AJAX is limited to the same domain. Applications like feed readers or firefox extensions don't have this restriction.

Keyboard Shortcuts

When your on your homepage you can use the keyboard to quickly access your faves.

1,2,3,4 and arrow keys are by default enabled to allow you quickly access your sites. Numbers are counted from top left in grid mode, and from the first icon on each page in pages mode.

You can change your keyboard settings from the preferences tab under customize.There is also the option to use "A, S, D, F, G" keys if you prefer.

Still more...

We still have more help to write. Check back for more information about accounts and answers to common site problems