Google Page Creator is no longer accepting any new sign-ups. The standard message on the site is the following. For those who already have signed yup, this is a hint to get prepared to move elsewhere or Google Sites in this case.

“…We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs….”

What happened to Google Pages Creator?

• Static vs. Dynamic

  This is the era of CMSs or Content Management Systems. Fill up a few screens of configuration info and the site should be up and running with at least a demo page. That’s how Wordpress has grown in popularity. If you’ve ever had a blog you know the setting you need for Wordpress. And it was later named the “Famous 5-Minute Install”.

• Small things difficult to implement in GPC

  A simple task of including a javascript on the page could be a nightmare. The same goes for stylesheets. If you edit a GPC page in the HTML mode and include some style or javascript there is no way to tell for sure if it would work.

• Site-wide Menus

  People were having issues implementing site-wide persistent menus. The Google Sites is a considerable improvement in the direction. It’s definitely better and more feature-ful than GPC and tends to appear like a simplified version of Microsoft SharePoint - surprise surprise. Google wasn’t a mere silent spectator.

• All-in-one

  Plan, share, collaborate and connect - that is the mantra and that seems to make sense. After all we are already in the age of social networking. What if you set up a small site for one of the small Wordpress plugins you made or a Firefox extension for that matter? This is what people have come to expect of an application of this caliber.

• Technology

  GPC validates as “XHTML Mobile Profile 1.0″. Apparently a lot of thought was put into extensibility and accessibility architecting this application. But for some reason or the other, it didn’t quite come out the way expected. With Opera Mini already a popular for the mobile users generating the exact same web UI as on the computers, it’s rather time to move away from the mobile word. Mobiles are smarter than mobiles.

• A Better package

  In context of Google Applications. While they are offering several quality applications as a part of Google Apps, GPC wasn’t necessarily the apt fit in the package. Google Sites is a tools that gels and compliments other applications of Google Apps.

What has been your experience using GPC, Google Sites? Have you migrated yet or are planning migration? I am, and it would be good to hear your experience before I do.

Photo by JulianBleecker

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Flashmint is running an interesting contest. They are inviting wordpress theme designs for their newly launched blog. The prize money is $500. So what is in it for bloggers? Well if you can send them some of your traffic you could win $300 for the first prize.

Flashmint  is basically into web design and has been in the business since 2004. They’ve recently launched their blog. The blog is pretty new thus has few subscribers as of now. Also the blog needs a design tailored to their requirements thus this contest.

I know as a blogger most of you would have come to terms with web design. But if not you could always provide them a link. You could win anything from $100 to $300. Even if you don’t they still will give you a free PR 4 backlink for your site.

Note that this is not a paid review. Nor is this my participation in the contest. I bring it to you so that those interested may participate and benefit. You can learn more about the contest in their blogpost here.

A tip from my side. They are a web design company. Such a company may appreciate clean “and” unique designs which also project them as an expert in the field (a moderately flashy design signifying their expertise but not overdone). Of course they have set out some expectations about the design they are looking for.

Photo bySpacePotato

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The recently released version of the Wordpress theme - Thesis - is hot in the news especially in the blogger arena. It’s developed by Chris Pearson. The theme has been talked about at popular sites like ProBlogger and others and all the hype carried me to DIY Themes. Finally after taking a look (whatever I could do for free) at the theme, I have serious doubts whether a professional blogger would like to buy it. They say there’s nothing like bad PR (point 23). I believe that with all my heart and soul. So with all due respect to the developer here’s what I have to say about this theme.

1. Body font

   The first impression is lasting but not necessarily useful in the long run. It’s worse if you try to impress a web designer with this one. We are talking about the font-family here. The use of Georgia and serif font in the body text goes against the principles of typography. This makes the text harder to read while putting a lot of stress on your eyes. When you’ve chosen to purchase a premium them, you expect better. I seriously doubt any established web-designer would approve of such quirks to lure prospective customers claiming beautiful typography. Its lame.

2. The features

   Are there any at all? The claims point to the theme options or the configurations options panel feature. You can put the Google Analytics code and have your feeds redirected to feedburner. You can customize navigation from the options screen and put in a few images that cycle everything you reload the page. You even can add your custom CSS and images to a custom folder that comes with the theme. Guess what? I’ll give you some very easy alternatives for $999. And I’ll also give you an option not to pay at all

   • Get the feedburner feed redirection plugin from wordpress codex. That will take care of it for you.
   • Get the all-in-one SEO plugin to take care of Search Engine optimization.
   • Use the text widget from the widgets section and put in all your ads, tracking code there. You want to pay for that? You have my email.
   • And finally if you are so intent at customizing the CSS, navigate to the Theme Editor option under Deign in the default Wordpress theme. It will allow you to customize anything and everything without you needing a developer license. Put in a GPL license and you can even distribute on the newly gone public Wordpress Theme site. Customize it all you can.

3. The price

   $87 for a personal license and a $164 for a developer license. My take - I submit to you that if you are a developer, you start from scratch. Build some rocket-science features and then sell them for $10. That will only underline your authority as a developer and a creative one at that.If you are a blogger and more intent on using the theme, take a look at some of the best themes out there on the Wordpress Theme site. Also take a look at the free UBD Moneymaker Theme.

4. Accessibility

   You want to take another look at the Wordpress default theme? You can customize the header no end and it works on almost every known browser and mobile device. Pep it up a bit and it’s all yours to claim. There are better options than paying for this theme.

5. What it doesn’t have

   I’m also looking for some beauty and style here (other than threat created solely by the image rotator bore). I expect a lot of polish from a premium theme that I pay for. Gradients, colors, rounded corners, anyone?

6. The big problem

   Now you are left with (less or more) about a hundred some dollars. Well, you can forget about it or else send them to me.

Before I conclude, here’s another things I’d like to mention. They say “Great products polarize people”. So you are all free to buy and find the truth yourself. With that said, I’d like to hear what you have to say. And by the way if you are Chris Pearson don’t hit me please. Your comments go right here…

jakemohan

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To everyone’s surprise, Matt announced the release of Wordpress 2.6. It boasts of a number of new features. Wordpress 2.6 steps into a new paradigm and announces support for Google Gears Though at a very nascent stage, I’m very hopeful of Wordpress bring able to leverage many of the features of Google Gears in the future releases.

WP 2.6 now has a version control system or a feature where it will keep a track of changes to a post. This is basically the revisions of a post. A major feature I missed when I moved to WP from Drupal. WP 2.6 supports posting from a bookmarklet feature that was only provided by external plugins or software like ScribeFire. You can add this bookmarklet to your Firefox bookmarks toolbar and post any page. Additionally, the bookmarklet will automatically extract any images or videos on the site and incorporate them into the post.

Theme previews are more useful than before due to the fact that the new system allows you to preview your live site with the new theme before you make the switching decision. I’ve had some tough time redesigning Binary Turf recently before we switched to the new redesign.

A short list of other nifty features follows. In fact this leaves me wondering why brands like Microsoft keep on pitching too much about stability. Until and unless its a show-stopper people like to have features in a software than have the vendor pitch in the software on stability. And by the way no one can tell how stable a new product is until something gets screwed. That’s called marketing by non-existent fears. Features:

• Word count in your post.
• Image captions.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• Ability to upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click”.
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6

Image Courtesy Aeious

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Now is this what you would call innovation? They keep doing the same thing over and over again and yet they some how make news? i call it luck and Gods blessings. One reason why I believe in God. How else can you explain Microsoft’s survival. Well this is the second time Microsoft has repeated the act. Last time they did this was on the launch on Firefox 2. And yes someone did comment “…no it was not poisoned…”. So what? Microsoft has had a history of having committed such acts. They dumped a giant metal IE logo on Netscape’s front lawn. They then placed a statue of Netscape’s green Mozilla mascot.

But finally Firefox has its cake and is eating it too Take a look at the cake.

Microsoft Internet Explorer Team Sends New Cake for Mozilla Firefox 3 Launch - MozillaZine Talkback

Image courtsey:Manassas Cakery

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The changes happened sometime this (2008) April. But I was slow to notice. How come every popular blogs rank has hit the bottom. Looks like the guys at Alexa have the answer. According to their blog the Alexa ranking algorithm under went some changes. (As usual) the changes are for the better, thus the site ranks went down and hit the revenue from advertising.

Take a look at the ranking of the famous ProBlogger.net as compared to VandelayDesign and Binary Turf. Problogger publishes several blog posts at any single day while Vandelay Design is a niche site serving rich content about website design, blogging, etc. I’m assuming the data collection and monitoring is still taking its time to reach a stable figure at Alexa. The change has not been pleasant for many. These kinds of changes can cost you dearly when pitching your rank to the advertisers etc…

But all is not lost. Google’s page rank (if you have one) is another factor to reclaim your self-esteem. While Google is also tightening the noose on sites with its veto powers, create some rich content and accelerate up your networking. If not tomorrow, it will take care of your rankings in the not too distant future.

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We have released ColorfulTabs v3.2 today. This is more of a feature update than a bug fix. ColorfulTabs now supports fixed colors for upto 5 domains. This means you can have fixed colors of your choice for upto 5 domains.

In the future I’m planning to add regular expression capabilities to the feature so that you can have complex expressions to set a color for any domain. If there are any feature requests or bug reports please leave a comment on this post. (I often loose allt he feature requests and bug reports in my email I’ll be glad to improve things.

Do let me know how this build works. All the best and Enjoy. Do not forget to subscribe to the RSS here (yes the squarish orange icon on the top left).

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I was casually browsing the YouTube videos searching for a few reviews of the tablet PC.  I have recently purchase a tablet device.  It’s a Wacom Intuos3 considered to be the tablet device for pros.  Incidentally I came across a video of Guy Kawasaki interviewing Steve Ballmer.  It was an interesting video of an interview that happened at Mix08. Guy versus Steve… it doesn’t get any better than this. While Microsoft’s popularity has proven to be its own enemy, it is also a compliment to Microsoft. And now when the Microsoft CEO faces an Apple evangelist the excitement is high. Here’s the complete video for your viewing pleasure. Let’s see what the Microsoft CEO has to say about Yahoo, Google, Apple, Vista, Silverlight and more…

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Original story at http://adblogsense.com/google-retires-adsense-referrals/

It’s been a long time and people started tapping its seem less potential. However it wasn’t all fruitful for Adsense as Google announced the retirement of Adsense referrals on July 1, 2008. It wasn’t totally unexpected. Google had cut down the earnings for referrals by half and changed a lot of payment schemes for referrals. Apparently not all was going well.

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Firefox 3.0 employs a lot of new techniques for optimize performance and speed. Here my attempt to optimize ti even further to bring to you a build which is blazing fast, adapted for your specific hardware. Download Firefox Minefield 3.0 final version optimized for your individual use. Here’s the link.

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