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For the past several years, MSNBC provided a customized Outlook Today page that added news, weather, and stocks to the Outlook Today page. They recently discontinued the service and provided instructions to uninstall it.

Not all is lost however. You can replace their news, weather, and stock feeds with feeds of your own. FrontPage offers replacement applets in the Insert, Web components menu or you can find scripts or applets on the Internet to use.

I have a replacement page available for download. You will need to enter your own zip code or ICAO code for local weather, instructions are here. Instructions are in the HTML to change the news to feed to international or to provide sports news etc, and repeated here.

Download the replacement for the MSNBC page here. At this time, I only have weather and news available - check back later for an updated page with stocks.

If you currently use MSNBC's Outlook Today page, you can replace the contents of the MSNBC folder with the contents of the zip.

If you never used MSNBC's page and want to try this one, unzip it anywhere on your drive. From any Outlook folder or the current Outlook Today folder, right click and choose properties. Select Home page and browse for the files you unzipped. Add a check to the box to use a folder home page and click ok. If you receive an error about sync issues, click cancel. Now when you select the folder or Outlook Today, you'll see the custom page. Repeat the steps, unchecking the use a folder home page option to disable it.

I'm testing this on Outlook 2003, as both a folder home page and an Outlook Today replacement. It should work in Outlook 2000 and 2002 as well, but I haven't tested it yet.

Changing the weather

Use the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) code for international weather, which you can look up here. (You need the 4 character airport code, not the 3 character code used by airlines.) US residents can use their zip code.

Open the HTML page in notepad and search for "37601". Replace all instances of it with your zip code or ICAO code.

Changing the news feeds

Open the HTML using notepad and look for this section of text about halfway down the file. Replace usa.js, highlighted in green, with the feed of your choice.

<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript" src="http://www.erfilter.com/usa.js"></script>

A full list of feeds available at www.EasyByte.com. You'll also find instructions to change the look of the news feed there.

Interested in other Outlook Today customizations? See: