Tomi Häsä's Pages: About

Author

My name is Tomi Häsä and I live in Tampere, Finland. Discussing about Google and playing around with Google products is my hobby and during the years I have created a few documents about Google and that's why this website exists. I have received one Google T-shirt for participating in discussions on the official Google Groups forum and a hooded sweatshirt for participating on the official Google Web Search forum.

History

The first version of this website was created using the free Yahoo! GeoCities service in year 2004 (old URL: http://www.geocities.com/googlepubsupgenfaq/) and first it only contained the unofficial google.public.suppport.general FAQ, which also has three other authors, but I haven't seen them posting to that newsgroup for a long time, and the newsgroup is pretty much dead anyway as it has been replaced by other Google forums. The reason for making the FAQ is the usual: I started seeing the same questions appearing again and again year after year, so I started posting the FAQ once a month to the newsgroup so people searching for the newsgroup FAQ might find their answer without even creating a Google account for asking a question in the group and also to save some time of the group regulars who answered the same questions repetitively. That group has already been replaced by other official Google forums, but I still keep it for its useful information.

Moving The Site

When Google Page Creator (GPC) was published in 2006 it was natural I moved my Google-related HML files from Yahoo! GeoCities to Google's Page Creator (old URL: http://gpsgfaq.googlepages.com/). In year 2008 Google told Google Page Creator will be shut down and old GPC websites would be transitioned to Google Sites. I don't like Google Sites, so first I thought moving my page content to my own domain, but because my pages are about Google and because I thought why would I pay for kind of like advertising Google's own services with my documents, so I decided to stay with Google Sites, even though Google Sites URLs are much longer than Google Page Creator's URLs and Google Sites doesn't allow uploading HTML files or using your own CSS to make your web pages look exactly the way you want and I like that geeky freedom where you can edit every single character of the page source, not just some of the HTML tags. Also, Google didn't tell people what will happen to the uploaded HTML files in the automatic transition from GPC to Google Sites and because I wanted to change part of the website URL ("googlepubsupgenfaq" in GeoCities and "gpsgfaq" in Google Page Creator) as my website wasn't only about google.public.support.general FAQ anymore and at the same time I wanted to maintain the PageRank of my pages as high as possible, so I made meta refresh redirects (for HTML documents) and JavaScript redirects (for other documents) to this Google Sites website (you can't use HTTP 301 moved permanently redirects in Google Page Creator to tell search engines the new location of a file). My documents are more informative than entertaining (which doesn't mean I don't like using YouTube and Lively, watching television, etc.), so sorry about the dull black and white appearance.

Old School

You could call this an old school website as I'm using a text editor to create the HTML contents in my web pages. I could be even older school by using for example 7 bit ASCII text documents instead of HTML documents, but sometimes it's time to move on, and besides I can use links and special characters such as the euro sign (€) and Finnish characters (å, ä, ö) in my name and for the documents I have translated into Finnish (you could use the Google Translate tool as it has been able to translate from English to Finnish since year 2008, but well done manual translations are still a better option than machine translations). I liked the first version of Google Groups (GG1), which was published in 2001, for the simplicity of the web interface and that you could concentrate in the discussions without all sorts of sections for pages and files. Google Groups version 1 also downloaded faster than its successors Google Groups 2 and Google Groups 3, so you didn't need to wait for ages if you happened to use a slow connection (such as a dial-up connection that should be mostly replaced by other type of Internet connections, like ISDN, DSL, and cable, at least here in Finland).

Using Text Editors

First, I started using the default Notepad text editor that comes with the Windows operating system, but after experimenting with various text editors to find the one I liked the most, I moved to using the free SuperEdi (by WoLoSoft), which shows certain parts of the HTML source in different colors. I'm using TED Notepad (by Juraj Simlovic) to modify the line length to 70 characters for monospace text as I got used to the 70 characters limit in Google Groups (actually it is 71 characters, but just in case I'm using 70 characters). The reason I have a line length limit for monospace text with most of the documents here is that at some point I got bored answering the same repetitive questions again and again year after year, so sometimes I just copied the text from one of my unofficial FAQs to Google Groups to I save some time from writing the same information again. Also, by having the line length limited to 70 characters I could see how the text would look like in Google Groups before it was posted to a group. With monospace text using the PRE tag I don't have to tweak CSS and/or tables and/or DIV tags to define the paragraph width so that it is the same for different web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Also, no matter how long the URLs are, there is enough space for them to the right of the page without them being cut off as happens for example in Google Groups version 3 (GG3),

Backward Compatibility For Old Web Browsers

When I used HTML documents, they looked fine also with older web browsers that didn't support CSS. Google Sites doesn't support uploading HTML files, so Google Sites isn't very backward compatible. Web browsers that don't support CSS (or which support CSS2 poorly or none at all) should be for example Internet Explorer 3, Netscape Navigator 3, Opera 2 and NCSA Mosaic, and text-only browsers, such as lynx (UNIX, Linux, and Windows platforms). See links below for information about web browser history.

Web Page Validation Services

Before moving to Google Sites when I still was using uploaded HTML files in Google Page Creator and before that in Yahoo! GeoCities most of my HTML documents had valid and W3C compliant HTML and CSS sources (unless there were some special circumstances for appearance), but Google Sites doesn't allow uploading HTML files, so I won't worry about getting my pages validated as Google's web pages don't usually get validated anyway. See links below for information about validating web pages:

If I Had Bought My Own Domain...

When I read Google Page Creator was going to be shut down in 2008 I was thinking about the alternatives: whether to move my Google Page Creator website to Google Sites where you can't upload HTML files and use CSS or whether to buy my own domain and webhotel for cheap. I was looking at the prices here in Finland and thought about sharing that info with people interested in the prices in my country. In general, the prices in Finland aren't very cheap. At the time of writing this document (August 2008) here are some approximate and rounded prices when you are using your own domain and web hotel from the same service provider (prices don't include starting payments, because these prices are only for getting some kind of picture of the possible yearly expenses in case you are interested in using your own domain and web hotel for your personal or hobby website and you probably want to own your own domain longer than just one year): Ammuu.com: 34 €/year (50 USD/year), Arkku.net: 10 €/year (15 USD/year) (Kotisivutila) or 61 €/year (89 USD/year) (Kotisivutila++), LanWorld.fi: 54 €/year (79 USD/year) (for business customers only), Louhi.fi: 35 €/year (51 USD/year), MMD.Net: 72 €/year (106 USD/year), Nebula.fi: 180 €/year (264 USD/year), Saitti.net: 159 €/year (233 USD/year), Sonera.fi: 241 €/year (353 USD/year), Tokavuh.com: 63 €/year (92 USD/year). The prices have been converted to US dollars with the Google Web Search money conversion functionality in August 2008. Keep in mind that the aforementioned services have different features and that a service provider may have more than one package and may offer other services for additional prices (more than one email address for your domain, more site storage, bigger monthly traffic limit, SSH, PHP, CGI, etc.) to suite your needs. You can get much more exact prices from the service providers themselves.