Dec 14

Google Sites

GOOGLE SITES
 
Google Sites  is a structured wiki- and Web page-creation tool offered by Google.  The declared goal of Google Sites is for anyone to be able to create simple web sites that support collaboration between different editors.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
Marking my fourth year of Facebook posts on Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Under-Appreciated Rock Artists (I have last month’s band, Chimera on as I write), I began to appreciate that there is a lot of good information here that needed more exposure.  As I suppose most of you know by now, I write about much more than just a rock band that hardly anyone has ever heard of; for instance, in November, I started off Part 2 of “Women in Rock” with a piece on the 1970’s cartoon show, Josie and the Pussycats. 
 
Thus, I launched a website on Google Sites and put all of my previous posts on the regular Internet.  Here is the URL:  home .  My Facebook friends get first crack at the new posts; I don’t put anything on the website until the next month. 
 
I have been a bit frustrated at the limitations of what I can do on Google Sites, but the price is right (free), and I didn’t need (or at least take) any training to start using it.  One problem is that my labels don’t behave the same way on all computers; they look different on my home computer from the way that they look on my office computer, and I suppose they do on other computers as well.  I probably won’t solve that problem until I can upload everything to my sister Alison Winfree Pickrell’s website for her novels, as she has promised to do for me. 
 
I got the idea to split out “stories” – relatively long pieces – and also short “items” that I wrote on other rock bands and artists (and TV shows, and movies, and books, and all sorts of other things).  I have redesigned the website a couple of times, adding a photo for everything also; and I basically have the first 13 months (December 2009 through December 2010) fully indexed now. 
 
I started out with a lot of lists of the items and albums and songs, but I finally decided that everything should have its own webpage – I probably have 500 or so by now, and I have used 49% of the 100 megabytes that Google Sites allows me.  Needless to say, I will have blown through all of that space long before I even get to 2012. 
 
(Year 4 Review)
 
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My website, home continues to grow.  I now have about one-half of the posts fully indexed and distributed onto their individual web pages – from December 2009 through June 2012.  I recently posted the 2011 index, showing about 1,200 web pages.  I ran out of room on the Google Sites URL above, so I started a second website –  – and they link together very nicely.  I am about 64% through with the second website, so a third one is coming.  This was not my original plan; I have tried setting up a website elsewhere or moving to another section of Google Sites that has 10 times the available space, but nothing has worked out so far.  But I learned a long time ago that finding a workaround is crucial to using computers, if not to life itself. 

 

What I was thinking about for next year is to revisit the UARB’s and UARA’s on their fifth-anniversary month and expand on what I had written earlier.  I think that I will wait a year on that at least:  too much else to do with the website and all, not to mention my full-time job as a real estate appraiser. 

 

(Year 5 Review)

 

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Besides my usual commitments at work and at home, I am still busily sorting out my past UARB/UARA posts into my website on Google Sites, which can be found at: . I am up to nearly 2,000 web pages now, and I am getting into the meat of the writing: I am now working on my “what might have been” post in June 2013 about “the day the music died” that includes info on various rock and roll pioneers. That was the first time that I exceeded the 65,536-character limit that Facebook has on their posts. That has happened several times since, including twice this year alone. I have made a couple of additions throughout the website in the past year: I now have introductory sections from Wikipedia (except naturally for the Under Appreciated pages) at the beginning of each web page. I also figured that I didn’t have quite enough colors yet, so I have marked place-names with violet (though I have not tried to set up any web pages on those).

 
(Year 6 Review)
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As I mark 7 years of Under Appreciation, the sheer volume of what I have written staggers me. I have printed out hard copies of all of my Facebook posts – I just don’t trust “the Cloud” to always be there – and the pages measure more than 4 inches thick. I have set up web pages on what I have written about over the years through the May 2014 post, and they surely number over 5,000 web pages now. Eventually I guess I will set up a proper website, with all of the bells and whistles; but for now, Google Sites does everything I need it to do. The maximum size of 100MB was worrisome at first, but I later found that I could start as many sites as I want (five so far), and they talk to each other pretty well. The only annoyance is that I keep having to load up the photographs when I bring in a new Facebook post.
 
(Year 7 Review)
 
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I am now loading up the last of my monthly posts into the Google Sites website – – including Martin Winfree’s Record Cleaning Guide that came out on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (August 2015).  I always seem to be running 2½ years or so behind the posts that I am writing, but now that there are only quarterly articles after this one, I might actually get caught up this year.  
 
(Year 8 Review)
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Sometime in there, I got wind of a new version of Google Sites that was coming out.  “Classic” Google Sites that I had been using for the website all along was going to be phased out, and “New” Google Sites was coming in to replace it.  Over the years, I had noticed little improvements and odd idiosyncrasies in Google Sites, until ultimately, there was a top-notch text editor available.  It has color capability (I am using a half dozen colors regularly in these posts), “curly” quotes ( “ ” and ‘ ’ instead of " " and ' ' ), a lot of nice looking fonts with ‘Bold’ and ‘Italics’ buttons, 5 or 6 font sizes, indenting, left / center / right justification, links between the web pages – pretty much everything that I could ever think of using. 
 
From the little tidbits I saw online, I knew that the change from Classic to New Google Sites could not possibly be good news, so I put off checking it out directly.  The links between the webpages is what I most worried about, particularly since I had nine different websites on Google Sites.  They all “talked” to each other just fine now, but on New Google Sites, who knows?  Early on, only two of them had a button that allowed conversion to New Google Sites; finally, all nine of them got the big button, so I guess it was at least feasible. 
 
Finally, I decided to set up a New Google Sites.  My earliest website didn’t convert on the first try, so I tried the newest one, and it went through okay.  As it turned out, the links were fine, and the fact that everything was spread out over nine websites was evidently not going to be a problem either.  But all of the features of the text editor vanished – all of the color, all of the indenting, pretty much everything. 
 
In short, all of the copy on webpages in New Google Sites looks the same.  That is never going to work for me, and I am not going to settle for that under any circumstances.  Eventually, I will have to find a new home for my website; but meanwhile, Classic Google Sites is a great set-up that I am going to use until it goes away. 
 
Right now, I am making a pass through all of the webpages, one by one; so that they will have the same features and the same colors and the same links.  One of the most time-consuming aspects is putting in the curly quotes everywhere; they were probably in less than 20% of the webpages before, and in hardly any of the Wikipedia excerpts at the beginning of most of the webpages.  Mostly I am using the [ALT] key plus four number keys to put them in.  The left quote – “ – for instance is [ALT]-0147, which are all of the left hand keys in a row.  This isn’t just a vanity thing; having two kinds of apostrophes also throws off the alphabetizing in the index. 
 
In order to make sure I catch them all, I figured that the best way was to do them alphabetically.  So far I have gotten into the F’s; I have only been doing this since mid-August, so that’s not bad for well under six months.  This includes all of the extensive writing on Allmusic, the Beatles and Bob Dylan.  I am trying to get through it as fast as I can (having retired as of the first of the year will definitely help), not only because I have an as yet unspecified deadline before Classic Google Sites goes away, but also because I doubt that I will ever find a text editor that works as well and has as many features as this one.  I doubt that I will get much new writing about music done, but I have other priorities now. 
 
(Year 9 Review)
 
Last edited: April 7, 2021