Albert Tanutama

Google surprised me with their launch of Google Pages today. Google Pages is an online website development tools that allows you to create and edit web pages and host them in Google. The service reminds me of Geocities’ Page Builder service back in the 90s - only this time, some AJAX techniques are included for a WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get – experience. It has basic editing tools that allow you to perform basic text editing (font size, colors, bold, italic, bullets, heading etc), add and upload images, choose layout and style predefined templates. It also allows you to upload up to 100MB files. It is neat, but nothing revolutionary.

Not everyone is impressed with this latest offering. Nic Cubrilovic, currently guest writer of Techcrunch, felt that Google Pages is unfocused and underdeveloped. He said

“[Google Pages] is not going to be a threat to the younger crowd who are all creating pages on MySpace, nor to the audience of millions of bloggers who already have their online presence, nor to the players in the CMS space who offer a whole lot more in functionality and power. I am not sure who this is targeted at as the small business owners and non technical folk sure aren’t looking at Google for a website solution and considering there is no domain mapping at the moment being a business and handing out a googlepages.com domain is just, well, embarrassing.” - in short, it is a miss

Ken Schafer from One Degree noted undesirable consequences from using Google Pages publishing feature:

“[With] one click of the publish button Google will make their e-mail addresses available to every stalker, sexual predator, phisher, and spammer out there”

In general, the excitement seems a bit low – much like other Google products that have been hyped or rumoured before the actual launch (say Google Base, Google Video, Google Talk, etc). Nevertheless, I think Google Pages is pretty strategic. It is an important component that allows Google to compete with Microsoft’s Office Live services (Minus a domain management service) in capturing the Small Business Market. Imagine free web hosting service – tied to Google Account for accountability – with Google Base for product catalogues, Google Mail +Talk for sales or product supports, AdSense for marketing, and Google Analytics for evaluating marketing strategy. Why would Google do that? If I put Google payment infrastructure (which is currently used in Google Video) into the picture, Google would be able to tap into a new source of revenues from these so-called long-tailed businesses. Less grander scenario, I hope to see Google Pages and Blogger merge their features – allow bloggers to easily build and customize their blogs

Today, I’m officially participated in “Remix MIX06“ Contest, which is held in conjunction with Microsoft’s MIX06 Conference. The contest requires the participants to redesign the conference homepage simply by modifying its stylesheet (the HTML code remains the same). The design that I submitted is called “Bill (Gates) and Tim (O’Reilly)” – named after the keynote speakers. The design shows Bill and Tim sitting in a panelist table, ready to engage in conversation, which is what this conference is all about: the conversation between developers, designers, and business people.  

 
The entries will be judged based on overall design, creativity and popularity and the top three designs will win free admission to MIX, airfare, and lodging as well as a custom designed Xbox 360! It is worth to give a shot, isn’t it? So, if you like my design, kindly visit my gallery page @ http://blog.mix06.com/contest/gallery/picture329.aspx and rate it by clicking on those stars icon. You’d make a journey to Vegas possible

I have switched my hosting provider from Focushub to Dreamhost. They are currently promoting 20GB of disk space and 1TB of bandwidth monthly for about USD 8 if you sign up for two years. Now before you do that, I recommend to do Google Search for Dreamhost promo code. Some of the code will give you further discount up to USD 97. Apparently, Dreamhost does encourage viral marketing through their referral program. The referrer could get 10% of everything their referrals spend on hosting, or get a $97 one-time payment. To attract people, the referrer could create a promo code that will give a one-time discount.

Commission and rewards aside, migrating to a new hosting provider is quite an experience. I need to get used to new web management console, from de-facto standard CPanel to a custom-built Dreamhost panel. Dreamhost offers a basic  management console that allows you to manage billings, domains, users, mails, goodies (installer), status and supports. It’s pretty easy to use and more accessible via the Web than CPanel because Dreamhost uses standard Web port. Apart from basic web hosting features like PHP, FTP and Mail, Dreamhost also supports Ruby on Rail and provides Subversion (for versioning). Unfortunately, Dreamhost one-click install feature is not as impressive as CPanel’s Fantastico, because it has less variety of application available. It does offer solid application such as Wordpress (Dreamhost is recommended by Wordpress) and MediaWiki (which is used to run Wikipedia).

Because of the way Dreamhost handles database, I faced initial problem of setting them up. I need to create a globally unique name across Dreamhost servers unlike database management in CPanel (I wasted some of the good name because I made some errors). Anyway, I managed to install Wordpress quite easily. The next thing that I have to do is to update dns of my domain to the Dreamhost nameserver. It takes about one day before the domain to begin to work. Finally, I have to migrate my old blog content to the new one

Since there isn’t migration feature in Wordpress, I have to create and use backup from my old MySQL database and then import it in the new database. I then have to run update database script to upgrade the old database structure to the new one (I happened to find that feature by coincident – it is not that obvious). Well after a few trial and error, I’m now a proud user of Wordpress 2.0.1!

Well, if you’re considering to use Dreamhost you can use my Dreamhost promo code: “IWANT100PERCENT” for full $97 discount or you might want to consider ”IMNICETOALBERT” that will give me 10 bucks comission. If you do not need the discount, you can have me as referral (use alberthardy as your referral) then I’ll get a 10% commission each month

Microsoft IE team has launched the beta version of their upcoming browser version 7 at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/. Take note that side-by-side installs with IE6 is not supported with IE7. So, it’ll take a leap of faith using the new browser. Fortunately, it works nicely although it takes me quite some time to get used to it.

Two of the most important and obvious features of the new IE browser are tabs and RSS support. The tab browsing in IE works much like Opera than Firefox. There is a dedicated button to launch a new tab window, and each tab has a button to close it. IE7 is capable to handle a lot of browser tabs. It has “Quick tab” feature that will display thumbnails of all open tabs in a single window, much like slide sorter feature in PowerPoint. Additionally, IE will hide earlier tabs rather than squeezing them all in a single display window, making it looks (and works) better than Firefox and Opera tab browsing.

The RSS support makes it easy for downloading, storing, and accessing RSS feeds – as well as (searching?), sorting and filtering content. It works pretty well – I’m currently trying to figure out if I could use it to replace my existing news aggregator (I like that it could archive all items – but let’s see if it could perform well with large amount of content).

However, the IE 7 is not without any problems or difficulties. I’m having difficulty to adjust the fact that the navigation button is now at the top, file menu toolbar in the middle (you can tweak it tho), and homepage button is placed along the tabs. It initially crashed after I tried to reorganize my favorites (which somehow was no longer properly categorized after I installed IE7). As a result, I have to manually sort my favorites via my Windows Explorer. I didn’t realize tab group features until I read its complete features list . And I almost thought that I could not import my feed because I hide my File menu toolbar (otherwise, there isn’t much left to see with so many toolbars included). And I need to adjust my new google toolbar every now and then because it disappeared when I launched a new tab (a display bug?).

Overall, I’m pleased with IE7, although I’m currently blogging this post using Performancing (which runs under Firefox).

Yesterday, Google announced the beta version (version 4) of their toolbar. Now, this is one of their products that gets me excited.

The new version of Google toolbar has a bookmark feature integrated. I can bookmark frequently visited pages and access them from any computer that has the new toolbar installed. I like its Flock-Star button like feature which gets highlighted each time I visit a page that I have bookmarked before. It helps me to decide if I should bookmark a page or not. My bookmarks will be integrated into Google Search History service – where I can label each of them using delicious-like tagging system. Each label assigned is automatically displayed as a folder in the toolbar (Thus, you can have multiple categorization of sites). Rather than immediately label my bookmark, Google requires me to consciously access its “Manage bookmark” feature which might result in a better classification system.

Unfortunately Google has no “social” feature, where I could share and access other people bookmarks. Such feature allows anyone to contribute to a “common pool” of interesting websites where everybody could benefit. This is where social and private web diverge – social web allows users to leverage on each other efforts creating a bigger network value, while private web serves only the need of their user and service provider. Sadly, if Google bookmark service gets popular, the wonderful idea of sharing diminishes, which is why I won’t replace my delicious bookmark with it (I might use both though).