August, 2008 - Part 4

Google Page Creator is no longer accepting new sign-ups

Today Google has officially closed the new sign-ups for Google Page Creator. They say that, they have shifted their 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.

If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year. More information about the transition will be posted as we get closer to the transition time.

And thanks to Google, for allowing us to use Google Sites to create websites. You can use Google Sites to create websites, wikis, intranets, projects sites, club sites, and more. See http://sites.google.com. You can signup for Google Site Creator at any time. Google-Site-Creator

Anyway, Googlepages did not have many features, which is the main reason why it was not a buzz like blogspot or wordpress. So its a welcome sign to see some thing more creative, which has more features and under our(users) control.

But I am worried about one thing, that is the URL structure. Previously it was http://sitename.googlepages.com. What will happen after the transition? Because in Google site creator the URL structure is http://sites.google.com/site/site-name-choosen/ .

As many people have a googlepages account and they simply upload things to their googlepages account and link it to thier blog, to save bandwidth. If the URL structure changes means, all those links has to be searched and modified manually, which is a tedious job. Anyway, lets hope for the best and what we can do now is, to wait and see what Google thinks about this!

Gmail, small security option

This is just a small security enhancement found in Gmail. Anyway, many times these small things help us a lot, so lets not ignore it.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer or HTTPS is a URL scheme used to indicate a secure HTTP connection.

Https keeps your mail encrypted as it travels between your web browser and the servers, so someone sharing your favorite coffee shop’s public wifi can’t read it. Your bank and credit card websites use this same protocol to protect your financial data.

Gmail use https to protect our password every time we log into Gmail, but it does not use https once we are inside Gmail, unless you ask for it (by visiting https://mail.google.com rather than http://mail.google.com).

And the downside is that https can make your mail slower. Your computer has to do extra work to decrypt all that data, and encrypted data doesn’t travel across the internet as efficiently as unencrypted data. That’s why Google leave the choice up to the users.

There are two options to select from. One is to bookmark https://mail.google.com and then use it everytime we login to Gmail. Orelse we can set it inside our Gmail Settings. Below are the screen shots….

First click on settings. And then search for the option, in the General tab.

general-tab-gmail

Select whichever option you are convenient with.

It is good to see that, Gmail supports https scheme. But we can see that, some other Google services like Google Toolbar doesn’t support https scheme. Lets hope that Google is hard at work, to implement https protocol scheme to all its services.