As I blog the expansion of my SharePoint consciousness (powered by Mindsharp, if you will), I should note that I will be delivering information nuggets of varying size, in terms of both scope and complexity.   As I learned early in my SharePoint education, sometimes even the tasks that are the simplest to accomplish can have wide-ranging, and very pleasing results.  And so I hope that the bite-size chunks of learning will be appreciated as much as will be the, shall we say, family-size helpings.

It's gone 5:30 on a Friday now, so it's going to be a decidedly bite-size nugget today, and that nugget has to do with the personalization of portal pages.  I don't think I had ever even clicked on the dropdown associated with the "Welcome" message that appears at the top of our SharePoint portal before.   Lo and behold, as I learned early on the first day of the Mindsharp summit, there are several menu options available there, and one of them is the nifty "Personalize this Page":

This is probably one of those areas I'd have been concerned about affecting (read: breaking) the portal experience of other users if I'd gone in there blindly, but I'd have been concerned for naught.  Utilizing the "personalize" link will allow you to customize the look and feel of the portal experience for you, and you alone.  Trust me, you won't break anything.  Feel free to move items around on the page, apply a new theme, even remove Web Parts ... doing so will only affect how the portal appears for you, and everyone else entering the portal will continue to experience it as the default view (unless they have customized their own experience, of course).  So be bold, and spice up your portal's look and feel!