Easily Insert Picasa Photos Into Google Sites

Over the past years, Google Sites has become a central point for sharing Google files such as documents, maps, calendars, and now individual Picasa Web photos. Prior to this, albums could be added; this worked very well for showing slideshows of photos (I used it to show field trip photos). Photos can be searched for from within the Insert Photo window which is great since organization is not a top priority for me. Along with the ability to insert photos, uploading photos can be done within the Insert Photo window. I love how Google products are becoming linked. 

Inserting a Picasa photo into Google Sites

Uploading photos to web albums via Google Sites

Another nice addition to Google Sites is that announcement pages, site comments, and site activity can be acccessed as a feed. So, if your using a service such as Google Reader, all of these will appear in your unread items. Great features Google. 

Google Sites Outage.....

Update #2: Outage is over, here is a message on the Apps dashbar:

"The problem with Google Sites should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

Update #1: I just checked the Google Apps Dashbar, and the Sites team is aware of the problem and will have an update later today. 

Google Sites is down. I tried to log in to my account and received the following screen: 


Other Google services seem to working fine. I love working in the cloud, but when these outages happen I start to have doubts. Hopefully, Google sites will soon get offline editing. 

Google Roundup for August 26th - September 1st

This summer has gone by so fast, I cannot believe that it is Labour Day, and back to work tomorrow followed by teaching. It has been a busy summer on the Google front, now its time for some more news:

• If your a blogger like myself, you'll notice a new feature over the next few weeks. The new feature is called Following and it allows you to know who is following your blog. When the followers icon is clicked on, followers can be browsed, along with the blogs they write and you can read any other blogs they are following. Also, a new tab has been added to the Blogger dashboard called Blogs I'm Following, this will show automatically the latest posts from blogs that you follow. I love social networking.

Blogger + Social Networking

• Related to the above bullet, for any Google Reader users, you will now see a special folder called Blogs I'm Following, which allows you to see all of the blogs that your following. In the future, Google Reader will become more social by adding the Google Friend Connect.
• Hurricane Gustav is all over the news, and if you want to check out its current track, click off the weather layer to see satellite photos, radar, storm tracks etc. Check out many of the weather tools available in Google Earth by clicking on this file created by the Google Earth people.
• For all of you GPS people (I think I may be one soon),WikiLoc is a site that allows users to upload and share GPS tracks. This is now available in Google Earth as its own layer.
• Here is some more good news for Google Earth and Maps users, a new satellite which will be launched on Sept. 4th, will provide imagery for both of these programs, and it does this super fast, an area the size of New Mexico can be done in 1 day!! The name of the satellite is the GeoEye-1 adn has the highest ground resolution color imagery commercially available.
• Google Sites had just received a nice improvement. In the past, if you wanted to add a Google Spreadsheet to your site, it would have to be published to the world (shared with everyone), but no more, the requirement has been dropped.
• Some new features have been introduced to Google Calendar, adding a friend's calendar, creating new events for those busy schedules, and reminder times have been improved, check out this blog for more details.
• IES (Integrated Environmental Solutions) has released a free plugin for Google Sketchup that calculates a building's energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. It looks like the environmental movement is here to stay!!
• YouTube has introduced a new caption feature to videos. Check out this page for more information.

Enjoy the rest of Labour Day, and remember to fill up with an extra dose of coffee in the morning. See you all next week.

Google Sites is Amazing

As mentioned in last weeks blog, Google Page Creator (GPC) will not be allowing any new users and those that have accounts will have to switch to Google Sites by the end of this year. I kind of sensed the end for GPC, there zero news/updates being made by Google. Last week I switched to Google Sites (I refer to it as Sites), and I find it amazing, it can do so much more than what Google Page Creator could. Before you read the following details, check out my site created with Sites and the pic below to get a sense of what it can offer.

Web Site Creation with Google Sites

As the name implies, websites (Google defines this as a collection of web pages) can be made with Sites. The number of websites created is limited by the storage, 100 MB for the free version, 10 GB for those that pay for Google Apps (only $50/year, other services included). Similar to GPC, there are templates, but the selection seems to be better with Sites and editing of the page components (i.e., Header text colour) is easily done, very close to how Blogger does it. Unlike GPC, the sidebar and body width can be easily changed, it was a big pain and task to do this in GPC. Sites handles images very well, which was a major criticism of GPC, and text is easily wrapped around it. As you notice from the pic above, the actual editing of webpage content is very similar to Google Documents (which I now use for my blogging), much better than the editor in GPC. Gadgets can be added, there are quite a lot available but I've encountered problems with text wrapping around these. The biggest improvement over GPC is the ability to add gadgets that can handle uploaded files, announcements, lists, and text (text box). I am currently using files and announcements, these are created as separate pages, and the gadget just condenses these to a small box. For example, if you look at the page that will be used for one of my teaching courses, a files section will be found. This is actually a web page that is condensed to be seen in a nice, easily viewable box.
Sites is a excellent product, and a great advance over GPC. Once again Google has created another hit product.