My Googlepages is live

My first page on Googlepages is live. You can check it at http://faizee.googlepages.com. It's really for very primitive webpages, I would say as you don't have much to code - you can't upload your already built pages. I expect Google to offer this soon.

Interestingly, I didn't receive any email from Google on the availability of the Googlepages even though I had registered for it. It just occured to me that I checked the Googlepages again and all happened in a jiffy! Let me see what more new features Google has got to offer.

Google Pages - Again Waitlisted

I've been long waiting for such a service from Google and it did come at last - but only to again be part of a waitlist.

I've been having my own personal website in Geocities (Now acquired by Yahoo) ever since 1998. But of late, Yahoo's ads are quite intrusive and I was looking for an alternate service and was expecting something from Google. Today morning when I got a trigger from one of my email lists that Google Pages has been launched and immediately went to the site only to be told that because of overwhelming response, the service is not being offered to new signups as of now - so sad! I've signed up the waiting list and God only knows when they will open it up.

Let's hope this happens faster than the Google Analytics.

IE Version 7 Beta - my first look

I've installed IE Version 7 Beta 2 from the public download available. Microsoft doesn't advise consumers to download and use it as it is still in beta. It wants developers and website creators to use it and check for compatibility of sites.

After the first two crashes, the browser is quite stable. My colleague who saw me browsing something asked me why my screen suddenly looks wide and big. That's the first thing you will like about the IE ver 7.0. They have very wisely crunched all the toolbars to under 10-12 cms and you get a wide canvas to view the pages. The forward and backward buttons, refresh and stop buttons are all in line with the address bar. All the other button are in line with the tab headers. Amazing!

I checked our company's website and intranet to make sure that they look fine in the new browser. They look good. I'm sure none of the existing sites need any modifications in their coding because of the new IE browser.

This version of IE ofcourse has, tabbed browsing and support to RSS feeds. I'm not going to write anything about it. I'm only looking at those that are very innovative and will make it better than Firefox. They also have the search box adjacent to the address bar and you can add any search engine of your choice - a la Firefox feature.

I liked the option to choose the place where the temperory files are stored. This is something I badly wanted because everytime my machine became slower I had to check the temperory files. Now that I have moved it to the other drive (not the default C drive), I have the control I wanted. Note: One of the main reason I uninstalled Google Desktop from my machine was it didn't offer me the option to choose where it saves the index files. It saves in the C drive and over a period of time as the index files grow, the PC performance nose dives. I hope Google sets it right soon.

There are too many options available in the advanced settings and it is not for any layman. I will have to study it to see how many of them will really help me.

Will add more as I continue to use this.

IE Version 7 Beta

I've installed the IE version 7 Beta 2 in my machine now. I will write my views it once I use it for a couple of days. But, it has already crashed twice in the past 30 minutes after I have installed. But, as a beta, you can't expect it to be very stable.