Google Page Creator

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Google Page Creator is a Web page editing and publishing service, developed by Google as part of Google Labs. It allows any user with a Gmail account to create simple Websites. It was first released on February 23, 2006.

It uses a WYSIWYG interface, so pages can be created without knowing HTML or any markup language, similar to competitors such as Sandvox and iWeb.

Features

The features of Google Page Creator include:

• 100 Megabytes of file storage
• 41 web templates, which can be applied to individual pages
• 4 page layouts
• Limited HTML, CSS and JavaScript editing
• Autosave - edits are automatically saved at regular intervals
• Unique sub-domain for each user's site, such as http://username.googlepages.com

Storage space

Although Google Page Creator offers 100 megabytes of storage, the bandwidth limit is unknown, but there is currently a limit of 500+ files.

Files that are hosted can be linked to from any other site. Storage in Page Creator can also be utilised to upload pages to your account, without using the Web interface to create the page.

Experimental features

Since Google Page Creator's release, Google has added many "experimental features", such as (but not limited to) the ability to add widgets, cropping of images, or resizing of images to any size the user wants (not the preset "small", "medium", "large", and "Original Size" sizes).

Multiple sites

Recently a new feature was added to the Google page creator that allows you to create four additional sites with your choice of name e.g. http://nameofyourchoice.googlepages.com.

As of yet there has been no mention of when Page Creator will come out of the beta development stage. In the beginning, they were only allowing one site per google account, but this limitation was lifted in Autumn 2006. It's not known whether there is a limit to the amount of sites you can create in one Google Account.

Criticisms

Apart from server downtime and limitations on signing up caused by the great popularity of this service, the naming structure of the Google Pages domain has been criticized for effectively giving away the page owner's email address and hence putting them at the mercy of spammers. The upside of this is that it battle tests the spam filter of the Gmail, which adapts to spam locally and then globally over time using an undisclosed system.

Perhaps to address this vulnerability to spammers, Google allows the user to 'Create another site', which would be a new address within the googlepages.com domain. To avoid spammers, one can create a new site and unpublish the default site, which contains one's email address.

Lacking the ability to link to external CSS means in-page CSS has to be utilized, and such style code cannot change the basic structure of the templates. Some critics have claimed that the templates and limited customization will lead to similar problems (such as large numbers of sites with uninteresting, 'identikit' designs) as were experienced by the GeoCities service in the late 1990s. ^[1] An earlier criticism that Google's own Adsense program and similar services are not available in the Page Creator and needed a 'hack' to work^[2] has been addressed by the ability to include JavaScript in Page Creator.

Also, the file upload feature appears to not allow files larger than 10 megabytes, or fails on their upload. The maximum number of files that may be uploaded is 500, and folders cannot be used, nor is there any FTP access to uploaded files.

Downloads are also severely limited although not documented. Downloads are cut off after about 60 seconds resulting in incomplete files, making the hosting of anything except tiny files nearly useless.

In addition, some display modes cut off part of the view of the editing screens.

Page Creator's interface does not function in Opera.

Blockage in mainland China

See also: Internet censorship in mainland China

Both Google Page Creator (pages.google.com) and its pages hoster (www.googlepages.com) have been blocked since May 25, 2006. However, individual pages (*.googlepages.com) are still accessible.

Trivia

• Soon after Google launched Google Page Creator, it was swamped with millions of users. This caused them to temporarily block new users from using their new web application due to the server overload.
• Soon after the release a mirror server was found at pagetastic.com. For certain sites, the URL http://yourgmailusername.pagetastic.com may be used instead of the default http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com .
• The project's codename was "Trogdor."

References

1. ↑  Ars Technica
2. ↑  Adsense and GooglePages
3. ↑  The Blue Bulletin

External links

• Google Page Creator website
• Google Page Creator Tools, Tips & FAQ!
• Trojan targets Google hosting service