Google Sites just announced they're going international:
But there's still a few critical things missing from Sites:
Today we added support for 37 more languages.
But there's still a few critical things missing from Sites:
- Feeds! They have these great, blog-like pages for announcements but you can't get an feed off of them. You subcribe by e-mail to page or site changes and that should always be available but these days updates are better distributed by a feed (Atom or RSS).
- JavaScript! There's no way to embed JavaScript code on a Site's page. I understand Google's stated reason of protecting the world from nefarious webmasters, but then every other Google service provides JavaScript snippets for embedding!!! Sites offers a number of ways to embed content from other Google services, but having JavaScript would let me fine-tune things and would also let me get content from other services that Google doesn't have (yet :)
- Integration! I know Sites is just JotSpot re-branded but I wish Google (and others too) would integrate their services better. By that I mean homogenize. Why does Google Code use a completely different wiki system than Google Sites? Sites has a lot of features offered by Code's wiki but Sites looks much nicer. And Code has a really sweet feature: the wiki is stored in an SVN repository so you can access it with all the usual SVN tools.
OMG! An actual comment box on Schultzter! Let me abuse it right away.
ReplyDeleteOn a more serious note, this is exactly why I decided to use dedicated hosting service with database support like a LAMP and then roll my own code or use packages like Blogger and WordPress. Google Sites is pretty good, but I think it was designed for people who never actually want to use code or very very little of it, this is still a huge portion of the content providers out there. However, Google also has Blogger for these guys, so I get the feeling that all of the acquisitions over the years have had some degree of overlapping and that Google are slowly starting to iron them out into separate offerings.
Personally, being a "nefarious webmaster" is why I got into this whole web development game in the first place, even though I only use my powers for the Greater Good. I must admit that what you have managed to do with Google only tools is very admirable. Now you just have to wait and see if the local Google office notices and offers you a job or decrees you with an official Fan-Boy title.