FCC Launches Personalized Web Interface

Frequent visitors to the Federal Communications Commission website can now personalize the site's homepage by picking and choosing which elements they want to display.

My.FCC.gov, which the FCC launched in a Beta testing version Tuesday, has eight sample dashboards. Six of those dashboards are optimized for visitors from different industries such as wireless and broadcast. A seventh is designed for reporters and an eighth for consumers.

Site visitors also can build their own My.FCC homepage by mixing and matching 22 different display widgets -- each corresponding with some major agency activity or publication. Users can install those widgets on a separate website where they'll be automatically updated as the FCC posts new content, according to an agency blog post.

The FCC built the new site using the open-source Drupal platform and posted the code for it back on Drupal where other federal Drupal users can adopt and adapt it, FCC New Media Specialist Gray Brooks said. About 100 government websites are built with Drupal now, including FCC.gov, Whitehouse.gov and Energy.gov.

My.FCC is part of a larger revamping of the FCC's Internet footprint broadly aimed at making the site's content more useful for researchers and industry and more accessible to the general public.