Google Introduces Page Creator 307
Seoulstriker writes "Google has introduced an AJAX web-publishing application called Google Page Creator. The app is great for getting whatever photos, information, files you want published, and it doesn't have to be in the typical blog format. The published site is hosted at the gmail user page. There are several templates and page formats to work from, and as far as I can tell, everything is WYSIWYG. The published HTML is very clean, but it does have some leftover fragments from editing pages repeatedly. If you want to be precise, you can manually edit the HTML. There is a Google Groups page available for the service. It took about 30 seconds to get a rudimentary page online." PC World has a quick rundown on the service at their site.
Browser Support (Score:4, Insightful)
great for targeted spamming (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not just change their name to "Google Beta"? (Score:4, Insightful)
-Eric (who has been using "Google Groups Beta" for several years now
No opera either (Score:5, Insightful)
Gmail all of sudden stopped complaining that I was using opera and just worked. So they do work on it. Just have to wait for it.
Re:How good is it (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they're not. I've no interest in creating a blog [1], I just want to publish a few pages and some photos.
1: with the associated baggage of commenting, regular updates and whatever.
Misunderstanding of google strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oops! (Score:3, Insightful)
Google Page Creator is having a little trouble right now. This is not because of anything you did; it's just a little hiccup in our system that will hopefully go away soon. We apologize for the inconvenience, and recommend you try reloading this page.
That, i believe, is what people refer to as the digg effect [digg.com]
Email Address (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Shotgun Effect (Score:2, Insightful)
Excel
Visual Studio
Re:For a free service its not bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Wha? Sorry, I just don't see how GMail is "filled" with ads. They show up in two or three locations, but they're easily ignored text. In the case of the Web Clip bar they tend to be understated, yet they're labelled as advertisements so you can still tell. The most intrusive thing about them is that Google searches the contents of your email to display them. Unless maybe you're in a pool of users that's getting significantly more ads put on their page, or I'm in a pool that's getting significantly less, I just don't think that the word "filled" is appropriate. Maybe "sprinkled" or "peppered". Who knows, GMail is still in Beta, so maybe you are seeing more or maybe they'll put more on there before they release it (if ever).
I would expect a similar peppering of ads rolled out sometime during the beta of Google pages.
Re:Why not just change their name to "Google Beta" (Score:3, Insightful)
Google's image will be tarnished eventually if they keep increasing the number of half broken beta sites. Their logo will become a symbol of unreliability.
That isn't a strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
It is sometimes called the "shotgun approach."
Most businesses would not waste money on implementing an idea with no clear plan on how to monetize it.
Google has an interesting approach, but it is not what anyone would call a strategy [answers.com]
Re:The Shotgun Effect (Score:3, Insightful)
To me (and I'm old school about a lot of what I do - I say that to show that I appreciate change and am not an old kurmudgeon) google's renovations on a standard are very welcome. I hate using non-threaded email progams now because of gmail, I hate having artificual quotas and rediculous attachment limits, I like searching for things in the same manner that I have learned to search the web so that I find them. While I prefer no ads, Google's are a perfect balance of them making their money, me getting free services and nonintrusiveness. And, they're halfway useful.
Easy solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Finally, a use for one percent of your invitations.
Web Standards Compliance? (Score:2, Insightful)
The produced pages [googlepages.com] claim to be XHTML 1.0 Strict... but it isn't [w3.org]! The mistakes are pretty bad such as not closing <img> and <br> tags. Also there is so ugly HTML like empty <p></p> tags that you'd think would be easily removed. Also, I don't see any support for the semantic web such as annotating your page with rel="". The battle for web-standards will be won on the web-designer front: when the tools produce correct pages that'll give impetus for everyone to produce clean pages and for all other tools to get up to snuff. Frankly, I think the best way is to create an editor that only lets you create pages that pass from valid state to valid state by producing all the necessary tags every time you add an element so that you can't forget. It can be invasive but it can also be done well.
Please mod this up so that maybe somebody at Google will notice.
PS- What if /. required all post to be valid HTML (or plain-text) before posting them? That would definitely increase awareness and encourage good HTML habits! (After that, perhaps passing a spellchecker! :P)
Email in your Site Name (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How good is it (Score:5, Insightful)
Take the Drew McLellan page you linked to as an example. The HTML may be atrocious, but I haven't looked at the source code, so I wouldn't know. All I see is a sparse, but not entirely inelegant, basic web page. What's so bad about that?
That's because... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know how many people visit that page every day... let's say 10 million. If they shave 1000 bytes off the size of the file by not including spaces, quotes, slashes, etc. wherever possible, they save ten gigs per day in bandwidth.
Ten gigs per day over a month is about 300 gigs of bandwidth saved per month. Plus, they do it on some other pages, not just the home page, so they're saving a lot of bandwidth overall.
On the other hand, I can't stand non-standard-compliant HTML. It just makes me cringe.