Google Introduces Page Creator

Seoulstriker writes "Google has introduced an AJAX web-publishing application called Google Page Creator. The app is great for getting whatever photos, information, files you want published, and it doesn't have to be in the typical blog format. The published site is hosted at the gmail user page. There are several templates and page formats to work from, and as far as I can tell, everything is WYSIWYG. The published HTML is very clean, but it does have some leftover fragments from editing pages repeatedly. If you want to be precise, you can manually edit the HTML. There is a Google Groups page available for the service. It took about 30 seconds to get a rudimentary page online." PC World has a quick rundown on the service at their site.

Comments

file hosting limit

[Seoulstriker]

Apparently the file storage limit is 100mb. Not sure if there's a limit to the data transferred.

Oops!

[trentblase]

Google Page Creator is having a little trouble right now. This is not because of anything you did; it's just a little hiccup in our system that will hopefully go away soon. We apologize for the inconvenience, and recommend you try reloading this page.

Re:Oops!

[Daytona955i]

That, i believe, is what people refer to as the digg effect

You must be new here. Slashdot has been slashdotting sites long before these annoying digg users ever came around.

For a free service its not bad

[majortom1981]

for a free service that gives you 100mb of storage its not bad. I signed up and tested it. Your pages do not have any adds and you get 100mb for free. Even if you do not want to create a website its not bad for hosting picture files and other things.

No Safari support yet

[Chris_Jefferson]

Slightly annoying, no safari support yet, only internet explorer and firefox (couldn't check opera).

Re:How good is it

[NickFitz]

The markup seems to be striving to be as bad as Front Page. Somebody should tell them that <font> elements are very GeoCities 1997, that <p> elements can't be nested, and that creating a bunch of <div class="foo"> elements isn't that much better than nested tables. I thought Google could afford to hire competent people?

Drew McLellan has knocked together a page in which all of the above flaws can be seen.

A sterling job on the XSS defenses though

[buro9]

Had a play earlier as I was worried you might be susceptible to a similar thing as the MySpace "Samy is my hero" style XSS attack.

The following was witnessed:

• Inserting script tags = tags removed before publishing.
• Inserting style tags = tags removed before publishing.
• Inserting element on events (onclick, onblur, etc) = attributes stripped before publishing.
• Inserting basic element style attributes = tags left in, style applied.
• Inserting advanced element style attributes (stuff that can rewrite DOM) = just those attributes stripped, formatting attributes left intact.

So for all of the basics, the Google Page thingy passes all basic tests on XSS attacks.

Well done :)

I'm even recommended it on my forum already because the security gives me enough peace of mind to not regret doing so.

Re-edited summary for Google's Dark side...

[Anonymous Coward]

...if Google is evil (censoring etc etc), the article summary would have read like this:

Google has finally published their own AJAX web-publishing application called Google Page Creator. The app is getting photos, information and files you want published ; it won't publish in the standardized blog format, however. The published site is only hosted at the google domain http://gmailuser.googlepages.com/. There are a few templates and page formats to work from, and it looks almost WYSIWYG. The published HTML does have leftover fragments from editing pages repeatedly, but it could be called clean if you could look over that. For technical diehards, you could edit the HTML by hand, but who does that nowadays. As usual, there is a Google Groups page available for the service. It could take 30 seconds to get a rudimentary page online, but this will ofcourse take much longer for any real stuff.

...

Re:How good is it - it does NOT VALIDATE ;-)

[michalf]

lol, try to validate the page ;-)

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdre w.mclellan.googlepages.com%2Fhome

Failed validation, 16 errors. And these are serious errors that can tell you sth about googlepages engine.

michal

Re:How good is it - it does NOT VALIDATE ;-)

[generic-man]

Since when has Google ever cared about W3C validation? Google.com has 51 errors, an amazingly high number considering how small the page is visually.

Re:How good is it

[diegocgteleline.es]

Oh well, Google has managed to write a somewhat-crappy frontpage equivalent with undo/redo functionality, autosave...if someone had told me that he was trying to do such thing using javashit and making it work even with IE 5.5 i'd have told him he was crazy. Standards can come later (BTW, it's in beta stage), the difficult part is there.

Re:Compared to wiki engines...

[DeathBunny]

The big advantage it has over Wiki's.... NO F***ing stupid wiki markup! I've tried several times to setup internal Wiki's at work. Wiki markup has always been a big show stopper for user acceptance.

Re:That isn't a strategy

[Dun Malg]

Relying on luck to weed out the good ideas from the bad is not a strategy. It is sometimes called the "shotgun approach." Google has an interesting approach, but it is not what anyone would call a strategy

It's not their entire strategy, it's only part of their strategy. You make it sound like everyone at google is just randomly trying stuff to see if it sticks. In reality, most of their time is is spent on planned development. They are encouraged, however, to spend some fraction of their work time on personal projects. In other words, they figuratively spend most of their day taking aimed shots at specific targets, but once or twice a day they shoot in a random direction with a shotgun.