Digital Charity

I think I posted this site already, long ago but it's certainly worth repeating and now that I think of it, worth putting up on my permanent links collection as well, which is an oversight I'll be sure to correct a.s.a.p. Digitalcharity.com is an easy way for you to give a little, with a bare minimum of fuss. It's a selection of sites that - with help from sponsor programs - will allow you to contribute to various charities simply and easily. Just pick a charity, click a link and you're done. In fact, I'd say it takes a total of 2 minutes (if that) to click through all the ones listed at the top of The Hunger Site page and they're all worthwhile causes. I particularly like the Animal Rescue Site - each time you click, sponsors pay for a bowl of food for a homeles, sheltered animal - but I'm making it a point to go there each day and click all of them since it's so easy, like I said, there's really no reason not to.

A more extensive list of charities like this can be found here on this page, which a poster on Fark owns and offered up in one of the forum threads regarding makethatdifference.com, yet another charitable meta-site.

My Way

My Way is a new internet portal that's out to compete with the big boys and really seems pretty worthwhile. While Yahoo!'s main and their "My Yahoo!" pages use Google, the results were filtered through the Yahoo! directory instead of just giving you the straight up results of a normal Google search, which bugged me. I couldn't configure my address bar to use Google as it's default, either, which also bugged me. Sure, I could just use Google as my start page but I also like having the news items and other stuff I have on my Yahoo! start page when I connect, so I can get a quick look at what's going on in the world and make sure there's no crazy smallpox outbreak, nothing's blown up, on fire or nuked as I drink my morning Mountain Dew.

My Way to the rescue. Not only is there a straight-up Google search bar, complete with the "I'm feeling lucky" button, but it's practically a carbon copy of Yahoo's main page - without all the extemporaneous junk they've started adding of late. My Way loads up superfast (up to 53 percent faster than Yahoo! according to their boast, which sounds about right) and I get my news and my handy Google search. Worth a look if you're a Google devotee and you want a good, fast-loading start page with google, news, etc. and a minimum of crap.