Welcome to my new Google Pages account. I'll be fussing with this on a normal basis in order to test the service, since it is in beta. I'm pretty excited about seeing how all of this stuff works, so I'll be posting comments here about my experience with the software.

Initial Thoughts 

March 23, 2006 | 1:33 pm

Today is the first day of using this software. It's pretty interesting. There is a considerable use of CSS in the background. When I first heard of Google Pages, I wondered if they would let users edit the HTML of the page. Indeed they do. In fact, it's a pretty simplistic html edit. For example, all the main headings (currently the Initial Thoughts and About Me headings) are h2 headings in the html box. Obviously, there is a bit more formatting being done behind the scenes by the browser, however, it's interesting that the user is just exposed to straightforward HTML. It's a very elegant approach - give some basic HTML conventions and use browser formatting/css/whatever else to format those basic html items into something that looks cool.

Now before you start telling me that this is done all over the world on practically every web page, consider  that each box on this page is separated out. When I click the "Edit HTML" link for any of the separate boxes, I only get the code that should be in that box. I think that's an interesting approach. In addition, I really appreciate the undo/redo buttons that google has given me. I've used them already and they work well.

Finally, I'm currently editing this page on my youth room computer - a P2 with about 128MB of ram. The interface is pretty quick and responsive, which is saying something. I don't think that I would be able to run too many other WYSIWYG programs for website creation on here without those programs running extremely slow. Initial impressions are that the pages system from Google is pretty neat. There are a few limitations that I have noticed so far, but I'll put them up at a future date.

Edit: One more note. I just published this page for the first time. I was given the option to send an email to friends to let them know I have a new web page up. When I clicked the link, a window came up with a new message to send through my gmail account. I thought that was pretty standard, however, the sending screen worked just the same as gmail, filling in addresses and such. In addition, after sending the email, the software automatically closed down the email sending window for me. To a generic user, it feels just like a well put together application that integrates perfectly with your email. That was impressive!

About Me  

I am a youth minister in Kansas. I came to this job through a very non-traditional path. I graduated from Marquette University in 2003 with a degree in Computer Science and went to work for a small company that created software for the home health and hospice industries. During my time there, the company was acquired by a much larger entity. At this previous job, I realized that God did not create me to live the corporate life, despite my previous inclinations. As a result, after a lot of prayer and discernment, I left my job to get involved in ministry.