L3DT users' community
Large 3D terrain generator

Google Page Creator

Rants and raves, mostly.

Google Page Creator

Postby Aaron » Thu Feb 23, 2006 5:51 am

Hello,

It seems that Google is simultaneously trying to drive nails into the coffins of MS FrontPage and free web-hosting like Yahoo! Geocities with their new WYSIWYG* web-page creator, creatively entitled Page Creator:

http://pages.google.com/

If you've got a gmail account, you can create and publish your pages for free. I'm not sure how much space/bandwidth is allocated, but I'm sure detailed coverage will be all over Slashdot tomorrow (it’s on digg now).

Anyway, here is my test page:

http://aaron.torpy.googlepages.com/

Not bad for 30 seconds work, eh?

Cheers,
Aaron.

* If you’re not hip with all the web lingo, buzzwords and acronyms, WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get”.
User avatar
Aaron
Site Admin
 
Posts: 3696
Joined: Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:41 pm
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Postby Aaron » Fri Feb 24, 2006 10:11 am

Well bugger me with a rubber hose*,

Google pages gives away 100Mb hosting, for free.

That's right, free! Free as in beer. Maybe even speech (I'm not sure how that works anyway), but definitely beer.

On that note...

Cheers,
Aaron.

Footnotes:

* An Australian colloquial expression of surprise** that should NOT be interpreted as a literal request UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if it's your thing, I'm not judgemental, but anyway, the expression, at least down on this part of the planet, is very macho. I assure you. MACHO. Not macho man, as in the Village People, no, macho in the sense of Chuck Norris, who is claimed to be able to roundhouse kick to death the entire population of Greenwich Village, if he wanted to. It's a good thing that he's not judgemental.

** Speaking of Aussie colloquialisms, has anyone out there in the world seen the new Australian Tourism ads? What a slogan: "Where the bloodly hell are you?" Top notch, very cultured. We had a Rhodes scholar write that, I'm sure. Perhaps the even the Poet Laureate. Hmmm...sometimes I wonder, with management like that, how it was that we came to own or very own continent?*** There's only seven, you know. We've got this one, and we've claimed nearly half of another. Mind you' that one is bloody cold. Nonetheless, not bad for a bunch of people who think that "where the bloody hell are you?" might convince the well-heeled to holiday down here.

***Oh, that's right, the British turned up and shot the locals. I remember now. Hmmm...they've done that before, haven't they?

Requiem:

So, I've managed to get to the point of offending at least two nationalities and probably a few more, plus another 10-odd percent of the population, possibly some pengiuns, if they're reading this, and then anyone else who's left that has a sense of good taste and propriety. Well done me. This was a post about a web-editing program. Sheesh.
User avatar
Aaron
Site Admin
 
Posts: 3696
Joined: Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:41 pm
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Postby JohnJ » Fri Feb 24, 2006 3:35 pm

Gradients, rounded edges...man, this page has everything...



...except worthwhile content...



...just like most other Web 2.0 pages out there.


What to do? Hmmmm....I know! I can add a donate by PayPal button - all of those really professional- looking sites on the internets have one.
Donate $1

Ahhh...that's better. Around 30 seconds work and this page is already a paradigm of the new-economy.

Image lol
User avatar
JohnJ
Contributing member
 
Posts: 39
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2005 9:36 pm
Location: California

Postby Aaron » Mon Feb 27, 2006 12:45 am

Thanks JohnJ,

But you really shouldn't encourage me, you know. It can only end badly.

Cheers,
Aaron.
User avatar
Aaron
Site Admin
 
Posts: 3696
Joined: Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:41 pm
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Postby monks » Sun Mar 05, 2006 12:05 pm

:lol:

***Oh, that's right, the British turned up and shot the locals. I remember now. Hmmm...they've done that before, haven't they?


I'm not offended by truth. Let's just include the French, Spanish, Dutch, Portugese, Germans (not as good as us at it :lol: ), early American settlers....recent Anglo-American military escapades in with that.

monks
monks
Oracle
 
Posts: 292
Joined: Tue Nov 22, 2005 10:38 pm
Location: Middle Earth

Postby Aaron » Mon Mar 06, 2006 11:03 am

Hi Monks,

Indeed you're right, Her Majesty's Government is far from alone on the colonial-terror scorecard, and sadly your list is far from exhaustive.

Monks wrote:(not as good as us at it)


Ah yes; the British discovered the unbeatable combination of Henry rifles, spiffy uniforms, gin & tonic, and Michael Caine. ;)

Now, to steer the conversation back to the subject of Google Page Creator - which I think was the subject of this thread before I lost my frickin' mind - I was wondering if anyone else has had a try of this? Sure, they don't offer anything really fancy like PHP or MySQL support (it's free after all), but there's still a helluva lot one can do with 100Mb storage, no download limit, and no ads. Surely this has to bury Geocities.

Cheers,
Aaron.
User avatar
Aaron
Site Admin
 
Posts: 3696
Joined: Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:41 pm
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Postby monks » Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:15 am

Ah yes; the British discovered the unbeatable combination of Henry rifles, spiffy uniforms, gin & tonic, and Michael Caine.


Hehe...My name...is Michael Caine...Now not a lot of people now that...

Well we have our stereotyped view of the Aussies. We have a comedy show over here featuring a racist landlord of a pub. In his words 'Australians, they're bred for bar-work!', and 'Back off Brussels!'.

Speaking of top notch and cultured :lol: - we have an Aussie import called 'Kath and Kim' which is hilarious. It panders to our stereotype, just like Hugh Grant satisfies America's stereotype of the English.

I might even give the Google page a go...

monks
monks
Oracle
 
Posts: 292
Joined: Tue Nov 22, 2005 10:38 pm
Location: Middle Earth

Postby Mixael » Wed Nov 29, 2006 3:06 am

I know I'm a little late getting here, but that's my standard mode :)

Anyway, wasn't "The Land Down Under" a Brit penal colony before becomming a country all it's own?

I ask in fun, really. Of the many places I had to go with the military, Australia is the ONE place I wanted to go, but never got to. Now I'm sad again. Uh, that's all.

Michael
Mixael
New member
 
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2006 2:57 am

Postby Aaron » Fri Dec 01, 2006 7:04 am

Hi Mixael,

That's correct; when England couldn't send its petty criminals to America following the Revolution, they had to find somewhere else. The first convict ships landed in Australia about a decade later (in 1788), and believe it or not, on the 26th of January each year we still celebrate that anniversary as our national founding. It's variously known as "Australia day" and "invasion day", depending on whether you're a blind patriot or not. The surviving indigenous population prefers the latter term, obviously.

Anyway, the practice of convict transportation was pretty unpopular with the "free" migrants, and the process was largely stopped within 50 years. My city, Melbourne, was a free settlement (originally sheep farmers), so it never received convicts from England. My state, Victoria, received something like 1750 convicts (2nd-hand from the state of Tasmania), but nation-wide the total was around 160k. Anyhoo, if you're worried about descendants of convicts running a country; fear not. The majority of Australians descend from much more recent arrivals. The rather popular Premier of the State of Victoria, recently re-elected, descends from Lebanese migrants from the 1890's. I'm not sure about the current Prime Minister of Australia, though, since he certainly behaves like a criminal (POLITICS WARNING!).

Anyway, ripping off a government immigration site:

In Australia today...43 per cent of all Australians were born overseas or have at least one parent who was born overseas...


At the end of WWII, when Australia was (arguably) nearly invaded by Japan, the gov't started a policy of "populate or perish". The population at the time was 7M, and in the 60-odd years since, about 6.5M migrants have arrived, originally from Europe (devastated by WWII), and later from South-east Asia and the Middle East (devastated by other wars). The total population is ~20M now. So, basically, just about everyone's ancestors around here hopped off a boat quite recently, unless you're Aboriginal, in which case the boat trip was a bit less recent (like, 30-50k years ago.) In my case, my father's family left Ireland during the potato famine (originally O'Tarpaigh, or something like that), and my mother's family left Holland following WWII.

Anyway, there's a brief-ish rundown of Australian history and society. Would you believe that when I went through school, they didn't teach this stuff? (more world history, since we had a socialist-ish government at the time, or at least by today’s standards they were.) Now, with conservative loons in control, they like to teach things like the glorious Battle of Gallipoli, where a bunch of Empire and Allied troops (inc. Australians), under the command of some incompetent English generals (it's true, don't anyone argue), went off to invade Turkey in WWI, for no apparent reason. They got bogged down in trench warfare, and then after a general massacre of both sides (and much heroism on both sides, I might add), they retreated, with no advantage gained. The anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli is celebrated here as a national day also, though I always wonder how Turkey feels about us celebrating the day we invaded their country and massacred their young men. Britain doesn't still celebrate burning the U.S. Whitehouse in 1812, do they? Does the US celebrate the invasion of Mexico? How about Japan and the invasions of China and Korea? Nope, it's just us. We like celebrating invasions, successful or otherwise. Then again, we named a swimming pool after a Prime Minister who drowned whilst swimming (often compared to a "JFK rifle range"), so we're a bit weird about the way we commemorate events.

Anyway, that's enough of a rant for today. Let this post serve as a warning to anyone else who asks about Australian history ;)

Cheerio,
Aaron.
User avatar
Aaron
Site Admin
 
Posts: 3696
Joined: Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:41 pm
Location: Melbourne, Australia


Return to Off topic

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests

cron