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Monday, 27 November 2006

Google Page Creator: claim your extra website names






It's received attention already but I thought I'd mention, for anyone who doesn't yet know it, that Google Page Creator, the free web hosting and webpage creation service offered by Google to anyone who has a Gmail account, now allows you up to 4 extra website names or URLs on googlepages.com, i.e. 5 in total - see the Page Creator What's New page for more info. (For more on Page Creator see my previous post on free webspace via Google Page Creator).

So, originally when I signed up my web address there was http://improbulus.googlepages.com/ and I was stuck with that because my Gmail login is Improbulus. But now, there's a link at the top of the page, after you login to Page Creator, which lets you create another site with a new URL, and you can check if your URL of choice is still available and grab it if it is.

After you've created one extra site, you can use the "Choose another site" dropdown at the top of the page to create more extra sites, up to the maximum of 5 in total.

I've grabbed http://consumingexperience.googlepages.com/ and similar, needless to say, though there's nothing visible at that URL yet, just as a preemptive measure to stop anyone else getting what I think of as "my" blog name, till I get around to using it properly.

So if you have a Gmail account (see my previous post) and you haven't grabbed your sitenames of choice yet, best go ahead soon before the good ones all go.

As well as now allowing multiple sites, the What's new page says image editing features have been added (resizing, cropping, rotating, mashups etc), and - I really like the sound of this - each webpage on a Page Creator site will automatically have a "mobile edition", i.e. a mobile version of the page automatically coded to suit smaller screen mobile phones, presumably only if you create the webpage online rather than by uploading an HTML file you've written on your computer offline. I've not had the chance to test these extra features yet - I still feel Page Creator needs to be a lot easier to use for those who want to get at the underlying code (e.g. having to click and edit each part of the page separately) and I find it frustrating that part of the editing icons are still cut off at the bottom left in Internet Explorer, so I admit I don't use it as much as I probably ought to. But I look forward to trying out the new features.

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