Doing some quick research reveals that Google makes the chrome new tab page easy to change. Just create an extension, give it an attribute of “newtab”: “newtab.html” (link to documentation) and set it to whatever HTML page you want. You can interact with the bookmarks, recent tabs, etc as well as add in anything else you wan to do.

I typically use 3 browsers for various activities:

• Internet Explorer – for work related activities and testing my personal sites to see how much IE breaks my CSS
• Firefox - personal browsing at home and for developing websites, reading tech blogs at work (the RSS dynamic bookmarks are wonderful)
• Chrome - personal browsing at work (gmail, facebook, twitter, etc)

In Firefox, my home page at at both work and home is my iGoogle page. I get current news updates, slickdeals feeds, weather, and all kinds of other stuff that I miss when I open Chrome. I don’t use it as my home page in Chrome because I really like the new tab page functionality. Big icons let me open the pages I read most often very quickly.

The thought of combining the real-time stream of information with the tab interactions of Chrome leaves me wanting to take the Incredible Start Page, rip it apart (you can find the source for chrome extensions in your local machine), and put it all back together with all the bells and whistles I get in iGoogle.

The Solution: To begin with, I created a simple set of PHP scripts that imported the game data (player stats, island counts, etc) and parsed them out. This helped each alliance keep track of their own players islands and know when someone was attacking them. As the site grew, I eventually created a portal that provided a variety of functions and information essential to effective game play.

The site featured:

• Map View – instead of looking at one group of islands at a time, individual islands across a 5×5 grid could be seen. Player stats were overlayed (pic below).
• Attack Monitor – Using AJAX, a notification could be displayed the moment any island became under attack, making manually checking each island one at a time obsolete.
• Player Statistics – View players history to quickly determine activity levels and island captures.
• Daily Reports – after each night’s scrape of the game data, a report was sent to allies detailing the previous days activities.
• One-Click Attacks – Replacing multiple clicks and windows, the portal allowed players to designate a target and fleet size and send the fleets with one click.
• Fleet Visualization – Think of the War Games movie where the missiles are being launched. This replaced the game’s text-based lists.
• Battle Planner – Coordinating attacks with fellow players became a breeze with a tool to track the number of troops sent to a target island and helped coordinate launch times to land them all at the same time.

The Technology: Javascript, PHP, MySQL (the database has 0ver 9.9 MILLION records!)