Extract Web Snippets With Internet Explorer To Build A Personal Startpage

Many Internet users have their favorite websites that they visit every day. The weather report, tv program, world news, a forum or a blog with daily technology news. What if it is be possible to extract the important bits of those websites and combine them into one new site that updates itself automatically to present the information in compact form?

That is basically what Ecletic for Internet Explorer does. The add-on installs itself to the right-click context menu of Internet Explorer and as a toolbar button which when pressed changes the cursor into a tool that can be used to draw a rectangle around the desired information.

The snippet that has been marked that way will be shown in a preview window where you have to make the decision if you want to add it to an existing page or a new one. That page opens afterwards and all elements on that page can be moved around and resized to fit the screen.

It works similar to tools like MWSnap that can take a screenshot from part of the computer monitor by drawing an rectangle around the part that should be included.

The first custom page that is created by you will be the homepage that opens when you launch the startpage. Additional pages like weather, news or sports are available by default as they ship as presets that have been created by the developers of the software. New pages can be created in the preview window and are afterwards accessible by clicking on the white paper sheet in the main menu.

Each element that has been added gets updated automatically be the service. The user has the option to press the Refresh button manually to update the snippet immediately. The service lagged a bit during tests, it usually took a few seconds before a new snippet got updated and shown on the pages. Pages can be bookmarked like usual websites and opened at a later time again.

The application contains a link entitled Upgrade to Professional which leads to the homepage. The homepage however does not contain any information about upgrading or buying the Internet Explorer plugin.

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