Googlepages is being moved, retain your files.

It is widely known that googlepages has not been accepting new sign-ups in the recent past, since the inception of Google Sites. Google now, has decided to scrap googlepages altogether and shift the existing webpages to Google Sites. Googlepages as everybody knows has been used for reliable file storage rather than website creation by the blogging community.

Now What happens to your file Storage ??

Yeah !! your file storage is at risk. Googlepages in it's migration info on every account has categorically stated that the Javascript and CSS files will not be transferred to Google Sites. In the absence of any mention about images, they can be assumed to be at risk too. Take a look at the Screenshot below :

What Next ?

The Next course is as simple as that.

1. Download your site entirely, from the link shown in the screenshot.
2. Upload your files to some other reliable file-hosting service.

I bet you will miss google's reliability. If so, there is some good news for you. You can upload your images to Google Sites, it works. As far as Javascript and other files are concerned, you gotta do some googling.

Cheers.

Uploading Large Images to the Internet

Most people Upload their pictures to Image Hosting Services(Flickr,Picasa, PhotoBucket,..) so that the pictures stay safe forever. What most people do is that they upload the images straight of from their digital cameras or just the source files which are mostly heavy in size considering the Mega Pixel count of this generation cameras. While most sites retain the original image, you end up spending a lot of time and internet bandwidth uploading these images. In this post I will tell you how to save that Bandwidth and Time.

Follow these simple steps to downsize an image:

1. Download the Freeware (FastStonePhoto Resizer) from here
2. Run the setup and install the software to your system
3. Follow this YouTube Video that I made to guide you to use this particular software



4. What you saw was I downsized 33 Images from a 3MP Camera to 640*480 resulting in saving like 43MB of space. Imagine how much you would save if you had resized photos from a 8MP camera!

So next time when you upload your photos you will be done in a few seconds instead of waiting and wasting bandwidth. You could always have the originals in a Archive drive or a portable HDD. There is not much of a loss in detail and you can also have these photos printed with this resolution. You could also follow the same procedure whilst uploading images to portable devices like cell phones, PMPs as it takes more processing power and RAM to process huge images. Moreover the images would load faster and won't take up much space.Also this free software provides loads of other features like watermarking, cropping and others. You can also save your settings and apply the same for different batches of conversion.
Happy Uploading!!

Google goes crazy

I have been using the internet ever since I was a kid. Trust me when I tell that it is rare to see the world's top web search engine go crazy. Yeah I know, I have seen the April fools day stuff but today is not April 1st. I always wanted to visit the American white house website after US President Obama's presidency but never could. So today(31.1.09), I started my computer at 8:00pm IST and started Firefox at 8:10pm IST(yes, my laptop is the slowest computer you could ever think of). Google being the home page sprang open. Not being sure of the URL and not to waste time with bogus sites, I typed whitehouse.gov in the search box. First result had the same URL that I typed but said it was malicious and I was surprised when all the URLs in that page was tagged malicious. Just to be sure of any errors with Google I typed Google in the search box. Another surprise just blew me off. Let us see the screen shots



I knew Google did not provide integrated search boxes for malicious sites that could harm your computers. so of to my next search

My next search item was Google and the search results were just, you know, totally interesting! Search engine claiming itself to be harmful.

Being the most trusted online payment gateway I next tried Paypal. Guess what, the most trusted is now one of the harmful lot. With a closer look, you will see Wikipedia too joined the same lot.

Next was Youtube.com, and Youtube was malicious too.
I knew Microsoft always had a handful of bugs and problems but never knew Microsoft was malicious or harmful!

And finally I tried our blog and it was not tagged. We are not malicious. After all these searches I collected a few screen shots but never could spread the word as everything returned to normalcy at about 8.50pm IST. But you know it is sort of fun and frightful when a reliable source goes wrong. Lets hope to see more interesting stuff from Google this year.

UPDATE: Google came with the reason for its malfunction. The official Google blog says "Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.". A human error was the sole reason. How easy a '/' can capsize Google