Google Page Creator
Trogdor Lives!
Google's rumoured Page Creator is up. Very interesting. Spent 10 minutes just now futzing with it, and got a test page up with close to zero pain. Rotten product name, though. "Google Page Creator" - how very... literal.
Still; it's basic, and a little frustrating in places, but the darn thing works and does the job required of it pretty well. For people with only a very limited knowledge of page coding, it's an interesting entry-level solution. Pick a pre-built template, add some content, tweak the layout a little, and publish. Bingo.
It's kind of like Blogger, but without the post structure and all the back end stuff. Does raise the question again, though - just when the hell, exactly are the Google guys going to get round to throwing some development resources at Blogger?
Even simple, tiny little things like adding the "remove formatting" button from Gmail to the Blogger editor would make a bunch of people happy. Sadly, Blogger seems to be the forgotten child in the Google portfolio.
Perhaps one of their most widely-used products (behind the search engine, of course) and the last time there was any kind of an upgrade was when, exactly...?
It's really hard to answer that (only semi-rhetorical) question, in fact. Partly because they have a habit of sneaking little things into the product through the back door without anyone noticing. Or - more accurately - without anyone being notified.
But really - how hard would it be to have put some of the Trogdor stuff into Blogger. In fact - why didn't they just start on top of Blogger and push out from there...? Why have two WCM products in parallel?
There's a clue, perhaps, in the one frustating error that kept popping up as I was futzing with Google Page Creator right now.
In 10 brief minutes of use, I got this error nine times:
Now, clearly no one else was actually editing my page at the same time - at least, I really don't think so. But it's curious to note that they would build this error message into the system to trap for such a possibility.
The obvious conclusion (at least to me) is that the next step will be to offer collaborative page editing in a Wiki-ish kinda Writely/Jot/Socialtext sorta thing. Makes sense.
Meanwhile, dirt-simple Web page creation and publishing, with 100MB of hosting all bundled in for free. If you have a low end CMS/hosting package on the market right now, you should look to your laurels.
Google's rumoured Page Creator is up. Very interesting. Spent 10 minutes just now futzing with it, and got a test page up with close to zero pain. Rotten product name, though. "Google Page Creator" - how very... literal.
Still; it's basic, and a little frustrating in places, but the darn thing works and does the job required of it pretty well. For people with only a very limited knowledge of page coding, it's an interesting entry-level solution. Pick a pre-built template, add some content, tweak the layout a little, and publish. Bingo.
It's kind of like Blogger, but without the post structure and all the back end stuff. Does raise the question again, though - just when the hell, exactly are the Google guys going to get round to throwing some development resources at Blogger?
Even simple, tiny little things like adding the "remove formatting" button from Gmail to the Blogger editor would make a bunch of people happy. Sadly, Blogger seems to be the forgotten child in the Google portfolio.
Perhaps one of their most widely-used products (behind the search engine, of course) and the last time there was any kind of an upgrade was when, exactly...?
It's really hard to answer that (only semi-rhetorical) question, in fact. Partly because they have a habit of sneaking little things into the product through the back door without anyone noticing. Or - more accurately - without anyone being notified.
But really - how hard would it be to have put some of the Trogdor stuff into Blogger. In fact - why didn't they just start on top of Blogger and push out from there...? Why have two WCM products in parallel?
There's a clue, perhaps, in the one frustating error that kept popping up as I was futzing with Google Page Creator right now.
In 10 brief minutes of use, I got this error nine times:
Now, clearly no one else was actually editing my page at the same time - at least, I really don't think so. But it's curious to note that they would build this error message into the system to trap for such a possibility.
The obvious conclusion (at least to me) is that the next step will be to offer collaborative page editing in a Wiki-ish kinda Writely/Jot/Socialtext sorta thing. Makes sense.
Meanwhile, dirt-simple Web page creation and publishing, with 100MB of hosting all bundled in for free. If you have a low end CMS/hosting package on the market right now, you should look to your laurels.
