Your Windows Live home page is great as it is (home.live.com), but you can make it your own. Look in the screenshots below for the numbered blue circles and read the text for a description of what to do or what it does:
1. Home.live.com is incredibly link heavy. Roll over just about anything on the page and there is a link to help you do something (click on the clouds or sun and get the weather, click on the date and get history of the day, click on the orange headings and jump to the full view, etc.)
2. Depending on whether you have added photos or not, you will either see a big plus sign here, or if you roll over the photos, on the far right of the photos, you will get a set of tools "X > +" that you can use to quickly add photos, collapse their display, or hide them
3. In this area, clicking on your Public Status Message (PSM) will allow you to change it, or you can click on one of these other four links to Add people, edit your profile, share photos, add web activities, or pull down the "Do more" menu right below the four links (but above the advertisement)
4. Here you will find quick links that either take you to your Hotmail inbox or to Hotmail to compose a message
5. You may have noticed that "What's new with your network" allows to post notes on other people's profiles when they post an interesting Personal Status Message (PSM)
6. If you roll over an entry in the "What's new with your network" a small blue sun appears to the right of the time ago that it was posted (i.e. "29 minutes ago") and clicking on it allows you to hide that type of update, or updates from that person, or jump to a page where you can select the kind of updates you want to receive
NOTE: Doing the same thing on your own updates on your Profile (http://profile.live.com) gives you the same blue sun and the option to remove a particular update from being broadcast to your network
7. To customize home.live.com, pull down the options menu shown in #7 and select "More options"
8. From the centralized options page, click on "Customize Windows Live Home"
NOTE: You can also go to the same page by selecting "Customize this page" from the "Options" menu on home.live.com
9. From the centralized options page, click on "Add or remove headlines"
8a. Under the "Weather" heading you can enter a new location by typing in the new city, clicking the Search button and then selecting from the resulting drop-down menu (if necessary). In addition you can also switch the temperature between Celcius and Farenheit.
8b. Under the "Page layout" heading you can move the items in the two windows up or down on the page (i.e. you would rather have What's New on top of Mail instead of the default)
NOTE: You can't add to or delete from the lists here
8c. Under the "Number of items shown" heading you can adjust how many of each type of content shows up on the page, or jump to the photos or headlines configuration pages
NOTE: Don't forget to click the Save button after making changes on this page, or click the Cancel button to abort your changes
9a. Under the "Your headline sources" heading you can set the number of headlines per source, or by mousing over the source name of a source you have already added you have the option to remove it or to change the order in which it displays
9b. Under the "More sources" heading you have the option to click on the little triangles to expand or collapse the category, and mouse over the source and either add or remove it
NOTE: Don't forget to click the Save button after making changes on this page, or click the Cancel button to abort your changes
