Current location:	Tahanan
Current mood:	geeky
Current music:	Amanda Palmer - I Google You
Entry tags:	birthdays, comics, geekdom, google, techie, web 2.0, work, xkcd

00670: A Google Sites Love Rave
First, Happy Birthday to Bunny |ancient_source|, darling mother of Kince |kince13|! Wishing you all the best from the other side of the world!

Once upon a time, there was Jotspot, an independent software company that tried to offer "wiki" services mainly to small and medium sized businesses. They had a pretty good product going so one day Google bought them. Now Google purchases can go either way - they can become very big parts of the Google Empire like YouTube or they can disappear into obscurity like...darn, I forget the name of that weird mobile company. Anyway, getting bought by Google always makes something more interesting (especially to a Google-watcher like me) and so I tried to get into the limited beta but it was too late - the transition to Google meant closing the door to sign-ups temporarily.

Fast forward a few months and Google Sites was born as part of the Google Apps family of products. I didn't own a domain at the time, so I didn't get to play around with it right away. When I did finally purchase a domain for the Geeky Guide, I really didn't have a need for a wiki just yet. Bugger - and I was still pretty excited about using it to.

Skip forward once more to recent months and now I'm involved with a side project with Tobie and a friend of his. They ask me for a good way of collaborating online through something like a web forum and suddenly it hits me - Google Sites! I start setting up a page for us and now we have a working wiki / knowledgebase of sorts that's tracking the development of the project. It's proving to be a very robust tool and it's really useful in this regard and I'm glad that I finally have a real reason to use it. So far the others seem to appreciate the benefits of the site although mostly they've just been viewing the content that Tobie and I have been creating, but it's all good. It's just me being a good Google fanboy by demonstrating the useful nature of the Google suite of web applications.

Today I found myself tapping Google Sites once more - this time to create an internal knowledge base for the program that I'm supporting now. It's weird to tell the client to use their own product, but it just made perfect sense as opposed to me constantly emailing all these documents back and forth every time an edit is required or is just in need of client approval. It was surprisingly quick to get all my documents loaded since Sites apparently is okay with me copying text directly from Word while still retaining all formatting and hyperlinks. So after an afternoon of work, I pretty much have the site set up with a few Google Docs-hosted web forms embedded into the wiki as well. I just may add a Google Calendar for good measure, but I guess I ought to limit myself to what is actually needed as opposed to me trying out everything all at once, hehe.

So now Google Sites is really part of my list of most-used Google applications, right up there with Google Reader, Google Docs and of course Gmail. Man I love Google.

"Could not reproduce" = PUNTASTIC!!!