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Simply paste the following code in to the edit HTML screen of your Google Page, replacing the XXXXXX-X with your user code.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><MODULE><MODULEPREFS title="Google Analytics" /><CONTENT type="html"> <SCRIPT src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type=text/javascript> </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT type=text/javascript> _uacct = "UA-XXXXXX-X"; urchinTracker(); </SCRIPT> </CONTENT></MODULE>
Send your comments, questions and feedback here.
Here is an example of a flash file embedded in to a google pages pages.
Code to add flash to your page: <EMBED style="WIDTH: 452px; HEIGHT: 337px" name=obj11 pluginspage=http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer src=REPLACE WITH FILENAME width=452 height=337 type=application/x-shockwave-flash> Put the address fo the filename in the code where REPLACE WITH FILENAME is in the code. The code to add this type of content will be published here in the near future. If you would like to see this guide sooner then please contact me. Send your comments, questions and feedback here. Adding XSPF Music Player This one is a real easy one I did it in five minutes. First of all you need to enable gadgets. For more details on this see the article on this page relating to Gadgets. Once this is done you need to click on the more button and select to add a third party gadget. Give pop box the address of the XSPF player the URL of http://hideout.com.br/widget/musicplayer.xml if you would like to use someone else's server for hosting, or alternatively you can download the source xml file from sourceforge and upload it in your google pages. Once this is done you will then be prompted for a play list. You will need to give the URL of this list as well. In the example below I have used the default, and so I am not responsible for the content. To create your own play list you will need to open an application such as notepad and put the following in to the file: <playlist version="0" xmlns="http://xspf.org/ns/0/"> <title>INSERT PLAYLIST TITLE</title> <annotation>INSERT YOUR WEBSITE NAME</annotation> <creator>INSERT YOUR NAME</creator> <info>INSERT A WEBPAGE FOR INFORMATION ON YOUR LIST</info> <location>LOCATION YOU WILL UPLOAD THE LIST TO</location> <license>http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/</license> <trackList> <track><location>LOCATION OF MP3</location><image>LOCTION OF ALBUM ART</image><annotation>NAME YOU WANT DISPLAYED FOR THE TRACK</annotation><info>WEBPAGE FOR INFORMATION ON TRACK</info></track> Repeat the <track> to </track> as many times as is required to add all the tracks you would like to stream. Once you have created this file you will need to save it and upload it to your google pages account along with the mp3's. When you add the gadget and are asked for the play list give it the name of that playlist. I have also been informed that you can use, http://www.webjay.org to generate xspf play lists. The end product will look like this: Send your comments, questions and feedback here. Still stuck after asking a question, try Jo's tutorial. Utilizing Google Bases Google have recently launched another product in an impressive line up. Google Base. For those of you that have not heard of this product before here is a quick summary of the product. It enables any person in the world, any where to publish any type of document to the internet. Google will host the data and provide searching capabilities so that anyone on the internet will be able to search for it. So how can you use maximise this new product. Well first of all if you are using Google Page Creator you can compliment it with Google pages to overcome the hosting limitations of 100 files and 100mb. Instead you can use Google Bases to host documents, files and pictures and link to them through Google Page Creator. In the case of images you would open a Google Bases account log in to your existing account. Upload the image to Google Bases and publish it to the internet. Then go to Google Page Creator and place an image object in your page. Select the option to link to an image elsewhere on the internet. Then go to your window in which you are logged in to Google Bases, click on your image and select copy source. Paste this in to the Google Page Creator window and click ok. You should then find the image based in your page. What does this mean for Google Pages’ users. Well it means that you almost have an unlimited sized account in which you can upload content of all types. Furthermore this content will be searchable through the Google search engine. Please note that all content upload through Google Bases is searchable through the Google. Send your comments, questions and feedback here. Adding feedback forms to websites Lets face it most web pages in which you make are not very exciting if your visitors can not send you information through the pages. This guide will explain how you can create forms that will email responses to you. Personally I haven’t used this service to provide feedback on my site due to the number of emails I receive. Instead I have used Google Groups so that visitors and people with questions can see previous answers. But for those of you who wish to have greater privacy over feedback may wish to consider this neat solution. First of all it should be noted that to create a form that will send an email to you when a user fills it in requires some server side scripting. Google Pages does not support server side scripting so instead we use a third party free service to handle the forms. There are a number of services that exist on the internet that will perform this service but my preferred service is jot form and as such I will use it for this tutorial. However other third parties that could be considered include: Form Assembly Form site Information Technology Services - Form Builder First of all you will need to open an account with your relevant third party. Jot Form takes minimal information and as yet I have not received any spam from them. You can then follow the wizard in Jot Form to create your HTML form with the look and feel that you like. You can drag and drop fields, set formatting, mandatory fields etc. Once you have finished the form you should be presented with some generated code to place on your website where you would like the form. Copy this code. Then move you your GPC page that you would like the form on click edit HTML and paste the code in the window that pops up. When you click the ok button you should see your form appear on the page. The email service is managed through your third party. Send your comments, questions and feedback here. How to add a Google search to your website? First before a Google search box will be any use on your website you need to have your site indexed by Google. For information on how this can be achieved you should take a look at the article below. Once your site has been indexed by Google you should sign up for Google customizable search. This can be done at the following site: http://www.google.com/services/free.html. During the sign up process you will need to give Google the address of the site that you would like searched ie. http://martin.blow.googlepages.com once this is done you will be presented with some boxes asking for how you would like the results page formatted. If you would like the results page to match your Google pages site then you will need to access the CSS script to find the colours that are used on your page and match them up, I will provide details of how you can do this in a later article. For a beginner I would not suggest worrying over the colours. Once you have followed the wizard through you will need to choose a search box that you would like to display on your page. Copy the code given by Google Site Flavoured Search and paste this in the edit html screen within your google pages, page. (Edit HTML can be accessed by clicking on the edit HTML button when you are editing a text area on a google page, in some resolutions and browsers you may need to press F11 to put the browser in full screen mode to see this button) I have adapted the code on my search box as the tables in the template did not match the background colour of my page. This can be done and the code for that I have used for my search box is shown below. Adaptations that would need to be made are shown in capitals and italics: <center> <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/custom"> <p>Search Powered By:<a href="http://www.google.com"><img src="http://www.google.com/logos/Logo_25wht.gif"></a> <input name="q" size="31" maxlength="255" value="" type="text"> <input name="sa" value="Google Search" type="submit"><input name="cof" value="S:SITE NAME HERE;AH:center;AWFID:KEY HERE;" type="hidden"> <input name="domains" value="SITE NAME HERE" type="hidden"><input name="sitesearch" value="SITE NAME HERE" checked="checked" type="hidden"> </p> <p>TEXT HERE </p> </form> <div style="text-align: left;"></div> </center> Please ensure that you follow Google Site Flavoured Search’s terms and conditions if you edit the code. One of the most important conditions is that you display the Google logo that links to the Google homepage. For full terms and conditions please follow this link. Send your comments, questions and feedback here. How to get your site listed in Google? There are many ways that you can get your site listed in Google but if you are a new webmaster of a site and want to publicise your site to get it listed in Google the more of these that you can do the greater your chances of getting listed. You should also note that it is normal for sites to take up to 4 weeks before initially showing up on search results. For your site to get listed in Google it must first be crawled by a Googlebot. This is basically a computer program that accesses your page reads it, and will rate and categorise it within Google’s database of webpages. The first thing that you should note is that if you are using Google Pages according to this site of Google’s: http://pages.google.com/-/about.html#faq3 your page will automatically get crawled by Google. Still if you would like your site indexed quickly I would use other routes as well. The first I would suggest is to visit: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl and provide details of your site to Google’s scheduled crawler list. If you have other types of content such as images you may be interested in looking at some of the other Google products such as Google Base. The next thing to note is that Google’s crawlers regularly crawl the internet and when they find a page they read all of the links off of that page and add them also to the crawl list. So the more people that link to your site, the more chance of you site being crawled. In the near future I will be setting up a link exchange for users who have pages relevant to mine to exchange links with me. Another way of adding yourself on to the Google crawl list and helping the Googlebots to find your website is to create a Google site map. This requires a small amount of technical expertise to do and I will dedicate an article to it in future. But for the fast and dirty way of doing it here goes. First you would need to open an account with Google sitemaps at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ You then need to create a site map and upload it on to your website. This can be done using the tools available at http://www.sitemapbuilder.net/ You will need to get your account verified by Google sitemaps. This is to show Google Sitemaps that you are infact the owner of the site that you claim to be. To do this you will need to add a blank file with the title given to you by Google sitemaps to your Google pages. More articles on Google sitemaps will be published in the near future. Lastly you can also submit your site to Google Directory at http://directory.google.com/ In the near future I will also be publishing an article with basic information on how to improve your position in Google search results. Send your comments, questions and feedback here. Still stuck after asking a question, try why not try Jo's tutorial. How to add a Google Groups Box to your website? This article is coming soon, I know this isn't much help right not but sorry. To express an interest in the article and speed me up, contact me. Send your comments, questions and feedback here. Using Google Maps Here is a quick tutorial on how to use google maps in your web pages hosted on google page creator. The end result looks like this. First you need to save a google page to your computer that you will edit there to include a map. Put the text MAP HERE, in the page that you wish to place the map. Then go to google maps developer site and get yourself a key for using the API this can be done from the following site. After this open up your file on your computer. Just before the </head> tag, place the following code but replace the YOUR KEY HERE with the key you have from google: <script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=1&key=YOUR KEY HERE type="text/javascript"></script> Next find the words MAP HERE that you used as a place holder and replace the words with the following code where LONGITUDE and LATITUDE are placed with the longitude and latitude references for where you would like the map to be centered: <div id="map" style="width: 400px; height: 300px"></div> <script type="text/javascript" defer="defer"> var map = new GMap(document.getElementById("map")); map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl()); map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint(-73.972, 40.747), 4); var point = new GPoint(-73.972, 40.747); map.addOverlay(new GMarker(point)); </script> </div> If you don't know your longitude and latitude reference you can obtain them from this site. Once you have done this upload your file back in to your google page creator as a html file, and when you want to link to the pages the address will be http://username.googlepages.com/filename.html. Your end product should look something like this. It is that simple, for more information on things you can do with the google maps API see the google maps API site. If you have any problems drop me a message in my Q&A group. Also there is a google maps gadget drifting about on the internet that you may wish to use. Send your comments, questions and feedback here. Still stuck after asking a question, why not try Jo's tutorial. Redirecting your Google Pages Home Page - As found by Peter P Lupo Before I even detail this technique I want to give credit to Peter P Lupo for finding this hack. It is the one that many google pages developers have been waiting for as they want to add content to the initial home page that can only be created by editing pages off line. Simply on your home page click the edit HTML button and paste some java script within an image. It is so simple I can't believe I missed it. Below is the code: <img src="javascript:document.location='ADDRESS'"> Replace ADDRESS with the address you would like to forward to. eg. To redirect your page to my website you would put the following code in the HTML editor:<img src="javascript:document.location='http://martin.blow.googlepages.com'"> If you want to redirect to another site just change http://martin.blow.googlepages.com to the address of the site you would like to redirect to. Please note that after using this code the GPC editor reacts in a slightly unstable manner. As such if you get the link wrong you won't be able to use the Back to Page Manager link, instead you will need to use the back button in your browser. If you do make a mistake though after using the Back button in your browser you can go back to the page manager click on your HTML page and correct it. When you are ready to publish it click on the publish button. Please remember this is a bit of a hack to the home page, so if google make changes to the GPC editor it may not continue to work and could react in an unstable manner. For some of you though it will solve that all important problem you have been having. If you have problems with this code I know that Peter has since published another improved solution which is improved. I have listed it below. You can insert the code in the same manner as above. However I haven't had a chance to check this code out yet so it is an as is solution. If anyone uses it, please let me know how you get on with it. So far I understand it has had good feedback. <img src="javascript:if(document==parent.document)document.location='ADDRESS';"> Replace ADDRESS with the address you would like to forward to eg. http://martin.blow.googlepages.com/technical2 eg. To redirect your page to my website you would put the following code in the HTML editor: <img src="javascript:if(document==parent.document)document.location='http://martin.blow.googlepages.com';"> The key thing to note is that there must be no spaces in the src="...." bit. Send your comments, questions and feedback here. Google gadgets Google have just recently released new functionality to Google Pages. This is in the form of support for XML based gadgets. Here is an example of one: I have also used one on my home page to show a slide show of my photos that I publish using flickr. Although I haven’t had a chance to fully look in to the technology behind these I believe that they are based upon the google gadgets API. There are a number of help pages on how to create custom controls for your Google page. But what does this mean for the person that can’t program. It basically means that there are over 100 new controls that you can add to your Google page, and probably a lot more than that. These include, clocks, links to RSS feeds, local weather information, quotes of the day and many more cool gadgets. In order to access these you need to turn on Google Page Creator’s experimental features. This can be done in the GPC main menu. On the right hand side is a link to settings. Click on this and click on the button to enable experimental features. You will be asked to confirm that you would like to do this. It should be noted that these gadgets are in BETA testing and so may not always work. Furthermore Google can not guarantee the reliability of third party components. When you then edit pages you will see a new menu on the left hand side. At the time of writing this looked like a cake. This will pop up with a search window where you can search Google’s lists of gadgets to insert. You are able to insert any gadget that you can place on a personalised Google search page. Some of my favourites are the Flickr Photo Viewer, Clock and Calculator. For more information on these gadgets and how to create gadgets please look at the links below: Google Gadget API Website Google Gadget Search Engine There is a lot of potential for these gadgets within pages to unlock functionality that could not be previously be added, for example use of Google Analytics could be embedded in a component. Google maps could potentially be embedded through such components to ensure compatibility with the GPC editor and would mean that users no longer need to edit pages off line. If you have further questions regarding these components, the possibilities, or would like to see more tutorials on the subject please feel free to post a message to my personal message board. Send your comments, questions and feedback here.
Code to add flash to your page:
<EMBED style="WIDTH: 452px; HEIGHT: 337px" name=obj11 pluginspage=http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer src=REPLACE WITH FILENAME width=452 height=337 type=application/x-shockwave-flash>
Put the address fo the filename in the code where REPLACE WITH FILENAME is in the code.
The code to add this type of content will be published here in the near future. If you would like to see this guide sooner then please contact me.
This one is a real easy one I did it in five minutes. First of all you need to enable gadgets. For more details on this see the article on this page relating to Gadgets. Once this is done you need to click on the more button and select to add a third party gadget. Give pop box the address of the XSPF player the URL of http://hideout.com.br/widget/musicplayer.xml if you would like to use someone else's server for hosting, or alternatively you can download the source xml file from sourceforge and upload it in your google pages. Once this is done you will then be prompted for a play list. You will need to give the URL of this list as well. In the example below I have used the default, and so I am not responsible for the content.
To create your own play list you will need to open an application such as notepad and put the following in to the file:
<playlist version="0" xmlns="http://xspf.org/ns/0/"> <title>INSERT PLAYLIST TITLE</title> <annotation>INSERT YOUR WEBSITE NAME</annotation> <creator>INSERT YOUR NAME</creator> <info>INSERT A WEBPAGE FOR INFORMATION ON YOUR LIST</info> <location>LOCATION YOU WILL UPLOAD THE LIST TO</location> <license>http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/</license> <trackList> <track><location>LOCATION OF MP3</location><image>LOCTION OF ALBUM ART</image><annotation>NAME YOU WANT DISPLAYED FOR THE TRACK</annotation><info>WEBPAGE FOR INFORMATION ON TRACK</info></track>
Repeat the <track> to </track> as many times as is required to add all the tracks you would like to stream. Once you have created this file you will need to save it and upload it to your google pages account along with the mp3's.
When you add the gadget and are asked for the play list give it the name of that playlist. I have also been informed that you can use, http://www.webjay.org to generate xspf play lists.
The end product will look like this:
Still stuck after asking a question, try Jo's tutorial.
Google have recently launched another product in an impressive line up. Google Base. For those of you that have not heard of this product before here is a quick summary of the product.
It enables any person in the world, any where to publish any type of document to the internet. Google will host the data and provide searching capabilities so that anyone on the internet will be able to search for it.
So how can you use maximise this new product. Well first of all if you are using Google Page Creator you can compliment it with Google pages to overcome the hosting limitations of 100 files and 100mb. Instead you can use Google Bases to host documents, files and pictures and link to them through Google Page Creator.
In the case of images you would open a Google Bases account log in to your existing account. Upload the image to Google Bases and publish it to the internet. Then go to Google Page Creator and place an image object in your page. Select the option to link to an image elsewhere on the internet. Then go to your window in which you are logged in to Google Bases, click on your image and select copy source.
Paste this in to the Google Page Creator window and click ok. You should then find the image based in your page.
What does this mean for Google Pages’ users. Well it means that you almost have an unlimited sized account in which you can upload content of all types. Furthermore this content will be searchable through the Google search engine.
Please note that all content upload through Google Bases is searchable through the Google.
Lets face it most web pages in which you make are not very exciting if your visitors can not send you information through the pages. This guide will explain how you can create forms that will email responses to you. Personally I haven’t used this service to provide feedback on my site due to the number of emails I receive. Instead I have used Google Groups so that visitors and people with questions can see previous answers. But for those of you who wish to have greater privacy over feedback may wish to consider this neat solution.
First of all it should be noted that to create a form that will send an email to you when a user fills it in requires some server side scripting. Google Pages does not support server side scripting so instead we use a third party free service to handle the forms. There are a number of services that exist on the internet that will perform this service but my preferred service is jot form and as such I will use it for this tutorial. However other third parties that could be considered include:
First of all you will need to open an account with your relevant third party. Jot Form takes minimal information and as yet I have not received any spam from them. You can then follow the wizard in Jot Form to create your HTML form with the look and feel that you like. You can drag and drop fields, set formatting, mandatory fields etc. Once you have finished the form you should be presented with some generated code to place on your website where you would like the form.
Copy this code. Then move you your GPC page that you would like the form on click edit HTML and paste the code in the window that pops up. When you click the ok button you should see your form appear on the page. The email service is managed through your third party.
First before a Google search box will be any use on your website you need to have your site indexed by Google. For information on how this can be achieved you should take a look at the article below. Once your site has been indexed by Google you should sign up for Google customizable search. This can be done at the following site: http://www.google.com/services/free.html. During the sign up process you will need to give Google the address of the site that you would like searched ie. http://martin.blow.googlepages.com once this is done you will be presented with some boxes asking for how you would like the results page formatted. If you would like the results page to match your Google pages site then you will need to access the CSS script to find the colours that are used on your page and match them up, I will provide details of how you can do this in a later article. For a beginner I would not suggest worrying over the colours. Once you have followed the wizard through you will need to choose a search box that you would like to display on your page. Copy the code given by Google Site Flavoured Search and paste this in the edit html screen within your google pages, page. (Edit HTML can be accessed by clicking on the edit HTML button when you are editing a text area on a google page, in some resolutions and browsers you may need to press F11 to put the browser in full screen mode to see this button)
I have adapted the code on my search box as the tables in the template did not match the background colour of my page. This can be done and the code for that I have used for my search box is shown below. Adaptations that would need to be made are shown in capitals and italics:
<center> <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/custom"> <p>Search Powered By:<a href="http://www.google.com"><img src="http://www.google.com/logos/Logo_25wht.gif"></a> <input name="q" size="31" maxlength="255" value="" type="text"> <input name="sa" value="Google Search" type="submit"><input name="cof" value="S:SITE NAME HERE;AH:center;AWFID:KEY HERE;" type="hidden"> <input name="domains" value="SITE NAME HERE" type="hidden"><input name="sitesearch" value="SITE NAME HERE" checked="checked" type="hidden"> </p> <p>TEXT HERE </p> </form> <div style="text-align: left;"></div> </center>
Please ensure that you follow Google Site Flavoured Search’s terms and conditions if you edit the code. One of the most important conditions is that you display the Google logo that links to the Google homepage. For full terms and conditions please follow this link.
There are many ways that you can get your site listed in Google but if you are a new webmaster of a site and want to publicise your site to get it listed in Google the more of these that you can do the greater your chances of getting listed. You should also note that it is normal for sites to take up to 4 weeks before initially showing up on search results.
For your site to get listed in Google it must first be crawled by a Googlebot. This is basically a computer program that accesses your page reads it, and will rate and categorise it within Google’s database of webpages.
The first thing that you should note is that if you are using Google Pages according to this site of Google’s: http://pages.google.com/-/about.html#faq3 your page will automatically get crawled by Google. Still if you would like your site indexed quickly I would use other routes as well.
The first I would suggest is to visit: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl and provide details of your site to Google’s scheduled crawler list. If you have other types of content such as images you may be interested in looking at some of the other Google products such as Google Base.
The next thing to note is that Google’s crawlers regularly crawl the internet and when they find a page they read all of the links off of that page and add them also to the crawl list. So the more people that link to your site, the more chance of you site being crawled. In the near future I will be setting up a link exchange for users who have pages relevant to mine to exchange links with me.
Another way of adding yourself on to the Google crawl list and helping the Googlebots to find your website is to create a Google site map. This requires a small amount of technical expertise to do and I will dedicate an article to it in future. But for the fast and dirty way of doing it here goes. First you would need to open an account with Google sitemaps at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
You then need to create a site map and upload it on to your website. This can be done using the tools available at http://www.sitemapbuilder.net/
You will need to get your account verified by Google sitemaps. This is to show Google Sitemaps that you are infact the owner of the site that you claim to be. To do this you will need to add a blank file with the title given to you by Google sitemaps to your Google pages. More articles on Google sitemaps will be published in the near future.
Lastly you can also submit your site to Google Directory at http://directory.google.com/
In the near future I will also be publishing an article with basic information on how to improve your position in Google search results.
Still stuck after asking a question, try why not try Jo's tutorial.
This article is coming soon, I know this isn't much help right not but sorry. To express an interest in the article and speed me up, contact me.
Here is a quick tutorial on how to use google maps in your web pages hosted on google page creator. The end result looks like this.
First you need to save a google page to your computer that you will edit there to include a map. Put the text MAP HERE, in the page that you wish to place the map.
Then go to google maps developer site and get yourself a key for using the API this can be done from the following site. After this open up your file on your computer.
Just before the </head> tag, place the following code but replace the YOUR KEY HERE with the key you have from google:
<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=1&key=YOUR KEY HERE type="text/javascript"></script>
Next find the words MAP HERE that you used as a place holder and replace the words with the following code where LONGITUDE and LATITUDE are placed with the longitude and latitude references for where you would like the map to be centered:
<div id="map" style="width: 400px; height: 300px"></div> <script type="text/javascript" defer="defer"> var map = new GMap(document.getElementById("map")); map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl()); map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint(-73.972, 40.747), 4); var point = new GPoint(-73.972, 40.747); map.addOverlay(new GMarker(point)); </script> </div>
If you don't know your longitude and latitude reference you can obtain them from this site.
Once you have done this upload your file back in to your google page creator as a html file, and when you want to link to the pages the address will be http://username.googlepages.com/filename.html. Your end product should look something like this.
It is that simple, for more information on things you can do with the google maps API see the google maps API site.
If you have any problems drop me a message in my Q&A group.
Also there is a google maps gadget drifting about on the internet that you may wish to use.
Still stuck after asking a question, why not try Jo's tutorial.
Before I even detail this technique I want to give credit to Peter P Lupo for finding this hack. It is the one that many google pages developers have been waiting for as they want to add content to the initial home page that can only be created by editing pages off line.
Simply on your home page click the edit HTML button and paste some java script within an image. It is so simple I can't believe I missed it. Below is the code:
<img src="javascript:document.location='ADDRESS'">
Replace ADDRESS with the address you would like to forward to.
eg. To redirect your page to my website you would put the following code in the HTML editor:<img src="javascript:document.location='http://martin.blow.googlepages.com'"> If you want to redirect to another site just change http://martin.blow.googlepages.com to the address of the site you would like to redirect to.
Please note that after using this code the GPC editor reacts in a slightly unstable manner. As such if you get the link wrong you won't be able to use the Back to Page Manager link, instead you will need to use the back button in your browser. If you do make a mistake though after using the Back button in your browser you can go back to the page manager click on your HTML page and correct it.
When you are ready to publish it click on the publish button.
Please remember this is a bit of a hack to the home page, so if google make changes to the GPC editor it may not continue to work and could react in an unstable manner. For some of you though it will solve that all important problem you have been having.
If you have problems with this code I know that Peter has since published another improved solution which is improved. I have listed it below. You can insert the code in the same manner as above. However I haven't had a chance to check this code out yet so it is an as is solution. If anyone uses it, please let me know how you get on with it. So far I understand it has had good feedback.
<img src="javascript:if(document==parent.document)document.location='ADDRESS';">
Replace ADDRESS with the address you would like to forward to eg. http://martin.blow.googlepages.com/technical2
eg. To redirect your page to my website you would put the following code in the HTML editor: <img src="javascript:if(document==parent.document)document.location='http://martin.blow.googlepages.com';">
The key thing to note is that there must be no spaces in the src="...." bit.
Google have just recently released new functionality to Google Pages. This is in the form of support for XML based gadgets. Here is an example of one:
I have also used one on my home page to show a slide show of my photos that I publish using flickr.
Although I haven’t had a chance to fully look in to the technology behind these I believe that they are based upon the google gadgets API. There are a number of help pages on how to create custom controls for your Google page.
But what does this mean for the person that can’t program. It basically means that there are over 100 new controls that you can add to your Google page, and probably a lot more than that. These include, clocks, links to RSS feeds, local weather information, quotes of the day and many more cool gadgets.
In order to access these you need to turn on Google Page Creator’s experimental features. This can be done in the GPC main menu. On the right hand side is a link to settings.
Click on this and click on the button to enable experimental features. You will be asked to confirm that you would like to do this.
It should be noted that these gadgets are in BETA testing and so may not always work. Furthermore Google can not guarantee the reliability of third party components.
When you then edit pages you will see a new menu on the left hand side. At the time of writing this looked like a cake. This will pop up with a search window where you can search Google’s lists of gadgets to insert. You are able to insert any gadget that you can place on a personalised Google search page.
Some of my favourites are the Flickr Photo Viewer, Clock and Calculator. For more information on these gadgets and how to create gadgets please look at the links below:
There is a lot of potential for these gadgets within pages to unlock functionality that could not be previously be added, for example use of Google Analytics could be embedded in a component. Google maps could potentially be embedded through such components to ensure compatibility with the GPC editor and would mean that users no longer need to edit pages off line.
If you have further questions regarding these components, the possibilities, or would like to see more tutorials on the subject please feel free to post a message to my personal message board.
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