So I fire up firefox and my home page has been igoogle for years. I have a couple of newsfeeds configured with their gadget thingie and I get a nice morning briefing of world news, latest offerings on freecode (formerly freshmeat), slashdot, SANs internet stormcenter and the current goodies on slickdeals.

igoogle is going away but increasingly, I don't want to be logged into google all the time.

I know about enough of html to fix flakey text formatting in a CMS.

Is there a relatively easy way to create a local homepage that basically does the same thing using either an online tool some incredible programmer set up, or would this be possible to do for someone to just do a little more reading on xml/html to figure out or would it be vastly more challenging than I'm hoping?

No, it's not easy at all.

You're talking about making a web-based RSS reader here. That's a complete and nontrivial application.