When I get some spare time, I plan on revamping the layout of this blog. Right now, it’s an ugly mess of hacks placed in Blogger templates. I want to make use of external CSS and Javascript files, but Blogger doesn’t allow you to upload those types of files. Since of the design goals for this blog is to run it for free, I wanted to have a way of hosting CSS and Javascript files without having to use a paid hosting account.
I read a cool blog article writen by Lars Gersmann on how to add WordPress style calendar pages to Blogger based blogs to jazz up the blog post timestamp. Lars provided the links the .css and .js files, hosted on his Google Page Creator account. That looked vaguely familiar, I have a Google Page Creator account gathering virtual dust out in the cloud. I logged in my Google Pages account and saw an announcement that Google was pulling the plug on Google Page Creator. if you don’t have a Google Page Creator account now and go to the site, Google Page Creator, you’ll see one of the messages.
On August 4th, Google posted an announcement that they would be shutting down Google Page Creator later this year in favor of Google Sites. Both sites let you create simple web sites very easily, but Google Sites, will not let you host your own .css or .js files. Sometime later this year, Google will be shutting down Google Page Creator and I’m assuming that any site left there will be purged. Google Page Creator was part of Labs.Google.com, which basically means it was a beta project with no guarantee that it would be around as a permanent fixture.
With Google Page Creator you could upload HTML files and it was much easier to make your pages look exactly the way you wanted using uploaded HTML files and CSS files (or CSS in HTML). With Google Sites you can't use uploaded HTML files with CSS and you can't use scripting either.
ReplyDeleteYes, it looks like Google Sites is a step backwards from Google Page Creator. It's going to be a really inconvenience for anyone who had linked to files hosted on Google Page Creator. That's the risk of playing with Beta.
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