SHORT SITED

Dick Pountain/17 November 2009 11:17/Idealog 184

I'll have to confess that up till now I've never really loved my personal website. I've kept it going for around ten years, but during that time I've rarely revised it, and hardly added any new content at all. Part of the reason was a certain instinctive reluctance to participate in the great web goldrush, but mostly it was my seething hatred for HTML programming. I realise that it was HTML that opened up computing to the masses, but in so doing it also set the art of computer programming (in Knuth's sense) back by at least a decade. It was as if all those flaming rows about structured programming and "GOTO considered harmful" had never happened...

I hosted that original site in my free FTP space on AOL, and used the cover-disk version of Netobjects Fusion to design it. When I first tried to tweak the generated HTML code manually I almost vomited over the unbelievably disgusting mess of tables and font tags that was revealed - finally I devoted a whole Sunday to hacking it with a virtual machete and reduced the whole site to around one fifth of its size, which then remained the core for the next eight years. Adding new content was such a chore that I just avoided it. Eventually I purchased my own domain, shifted the whole site from AOL to BT/Yahoo/Geocities space and redirected www.dickpountain.co.uk  to point to it, but the content remained the same apart from the home page.

It was sometime around June 2009 that BT emailed me to announce that Geocities was going to close sometime in October, and that its hosting deal would also terminate then. I thought, and did, nothing about it. Come the end of October I got a final reminder and then my site evaporated into thin air. I was now siteless, and rather to my surprise it seemed to matter that if one of my enormous handful of admirers were to Google "Dick Pountain" they would find no home. Clearly I had to build a new site pronto, and equally clearly I still refused to pay a penny for it (it's bad enough giving away your work, without actually having to *pay* to do so).

A half-hearted Google search for "free web hosting" only dredged up the sort of pond-life you would expect, but then it struck me, what about Google itself? I've already entrusted my email to Gmail (up to a point, with copies kept elswhere) so perhaps the mighty NoEvilCo offers a free web-hosting solution? It most certainly does, it's called Google Sites, and it employs all the technologies of Google Docs to let you build your site in-place online, rather than having to FTP it from your local PC into their web space. That cloudy idea appealed to me so I thought I'd knock up a quickie, stand-in site until I could find a more permanent solution.

My first attempt was deeply underwhelming, just black-and-white text, but hints of better to come kept me trying: I'd managed to port all the content from my old site (local copy of course) via cut-and-paste so the whole process took less than half-an-hour, and I noticed that the left-hand side edit menu offered not merely images but also videos and lots more, which piqued my interest. Next day I went back to investigate further and discovered - well hidden behind a tiny button in the top-right hand corner - the "More Actions" menu which offered everything that I needed, including a large palette of Themes from which I chose a restrained grey job. Colours and Fonts let me customise my chosen theme, so I played with that until I was happy and then took the option to save any of your own customised pages as templates.

Google Sites is based around a wiki engine with standard page templates Web Page, Announcement (a simple blog), File Cabinet (a store of files for download) and List, and any page type may have appended downloadable attachments and/or user comments. It takes some fiddling to create halfway acceptable layouts (you need to switch on "wrap" for the pictures) but eventually I managed to create a site that, while far from professional, looks far, far better than my old one. A downloadable back-issue archive of this column just meant choosing a File Cabinet page, while a photo-gallery for my pictures was knocked-up by saving a black-background page as template. Making that first black-background page was the hardest thing because just setting the text background colour doesn't look good so I had to edit the actual HTML for the only time (an option provided on the edit menu). Google doesn't provide any way to download your site for local backup, but the invaluable FireFox add-on Scrapbook takes care of that for me by capturing the pages and exporting the HTML to a local directory. 

Updating a Google site is so easy that I can now churn out a new page in five minutes, and that's kindled my enthusiasm for my site for the very first time - I might even add a blog page to air my bilious commentary about the state of world politics. Check it out at www.dickpountain.co.uk.