THE DESTRUCTION AND CENSORSHIP OF THOUSANDS OF WEB SITES. VIA GOOGLEPAGES.COM

Article By Craig Flindall

Friday May 22 2009

This is an important discussion about the creation and ultimate destruction of a great free Google application that birthed and ultimately has been dieing a slow cancerous death. One which will take place as of June 1/2009 the death certificate will be signed and the euthanasia of free speech and expression on the internet will take another step forward with the shutting down of googlepages.com and the Google page creator application!

Search giant Google's latest feature, a personalized Web page creator, appeared to have stumbled on its first day, Feb. 23.2006. i got signed up, then came another announcement as follows
"Oops!
Thank you for your interest in Google Page Creator! Due to heavy demand, we are unable to offer new accounts for today. If you'd like to be added to our waiting list, please enter your email address."

The reason? An "extremely strong demand," according to a message found on the site.

Page Creator competes with many other Web hosting services, most notably Google rival Microsoft's Live.com initiative and its growing base of at least 100,000 users.

I personally have been using Googlepages as well as many others to post appropriate content that had sites designed around a users Google.com account. Now of course Google has blogspot.com which caters to the more advanced crowd, but Googlepages.com offered people who wanted a personal uncensored web site with simple controls and best of all it was completely free and u got 100MB of personal storage. basically Page Creator is for users whose Web knowledge is more rudimentary.

Then came the death date. Any users to Googlepages now gets a message atop the screen of the page creator editor panel with the quote
"Your pages will be moved to Google Sites soon. [Learn more]"

Your then taken to a hiccup page (See photos) that gets another message almost in deliberate purposeful censorship & not giving the users the ability to backup the entire content of their Googlepages.com site.

"Option 1 - Do nothing, and your pages will automatically be moved to Google Sites

* We'll set up the new site and move your pages for you.
* Visits to your googlepages.com URL will redirect to your new site.
* Note that Google Sites does not support custom JavaScript or CSS in its pages.

Option 2 - Opt out of the move, and take your pages to a new location

* Download your site.
* Once you've moved your site to its new location, opt out of migration by setting up a redirect below."
My site is available to download in 12 different zip files.

I haven't even begun to examine them to figure out what to do.

All i know is that Google sites does not allow the support of custom JavaScript or CSS in its pages, that in itself limits you too what Google wants its users content to look like and any customization of HTML code gets an error, resulting in the inability to re size video and picture windows to your specified size to fit your page. the navigation bar and gadgets apparently will not be so easily transitioned or removable and Google has placed its own links at the bottom of every page. (please check the attached photos and links.

I feel as thought the last 3 years of using page creator have been a complete waste of time and a most total lost of the best web application that money never bought. i felt empowered to post the topics i felt were of best interest to my audience and i loved how I was able to make the site exactly the way I wanted it NOT GOOGLE's!

So im going to move all the content of http://craigflindall.googlepages.com to blog spot under the user name http://gigabytexxl.blogspot.com

I feel this is such an unnecessary waste of time and i'm unbelievably appalled that Google could mislead and ultimately shutdown thousands of users pages that will draw hundreds of thousands of complaints and dropped users.

i do not plan on migrating to Googlesites.I have personally used it and found it completely useless and the functions of the Google sites creator are completely locked down.
I Cant even try to begin to make my site from Googlepages to look exactly the same as when it changes to Googlesites.

So here is a great Thanks Google for taking a Rupert Murdoch step to Internet 2 and shutting down me and a great many users creativity and freedom of expression, and too all you users to googlepages.com ya'll have fun with googlesites.com, a kindergarten version of the web application your using now.

Thanks for visiting and be sure to bookmark the new site

http://gigabytexxl.blogspot.com

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