The following announcement landed in my in-box today:

Today, we’re excited to announce the introduction of Google Sites as part of Google Apps.

Google Sites makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. You can quickly gather a variety of information in one place — including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and gadgets — and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, your entire organization, or the world.

* Anyone can do it — Building a site is as simple as editing a document, and you don’t need anyone’s help to get started.
* Share from one place — Create a single place to bring together all the information your team needs to share, including docs, videos, photos, calendars and attachments.
* Work together — Invite co-workers, classmates, or your entire organization to edit your site with you to keep it fresh and up-to-date. And let as many or few people view your site as you want.

There are a few pre-made examples:

Take a look at some example sites to see how you might use Google Sites:
* Company intranet
* Team project
* Employee profile
* Classroom
* Student club

So far I’m rather apathetic towards it, but only because I can do everything it offers by hand. If I couldn’t, I’d be all ooh ahh.

I heavily promote the WP and Google Apps combo to my clients, so I’ll very interested to see how this project takes on Microsoft’s Sharepoint.

Bookmark

The sites claim that they aren’t doing anything wrong, and I do have to give their arguments credit, so here is the catch: if they remove the links, then they are modifying my content and aren’t “just another feedreader”, so I can report them, if they leave them in, I can get a little more traffic and “google juice” — although the later is falling in importance and relevancy —, or if they notice this post and remove my site from their list, I get what I really want. It is basically a win-tie-win scenario here.

I apologize if they are irritating to normal readers, but they are always pseudo-relevant links, so I’m not spamming you guys in response to being spammed.

P.S. Not all seem to be scraped, so I’m wondering how many times I need to say WordPress in a post about WordPress to get the WordPress “web reader” to borrow the content from my WordPress site?

Bookmark

Sorry for any confusion or weirdness. It just goes to show that you can’t trust random widgets you find on the web.

Luckily though, it made me revalidate my website and it seems that three different plugins were causing validation errors ranging from adding the “border=0″ attribute to images all the way up to invalidating my entire sidebar. I can understand minor errors like adding the border=”0″ attribute to images, but when the latter half of the page is invalidated, something is seriously wrong. The offending plugin has been removed and probably won’t be reactivated.

While I do understand that it can be difficult to test every possible combination of settings — INAP caused a lot of trouble for a long time for me, many plugin designers need to be more careful when their plugins are going to be on the front page of websites. A few extra minutes can save one a lot of bad reputation.

Bookmark

If you find any bugs on the site, please let me know by emailing me. Especially if these bugs have to do with INAP.

Bookmark

I apologize for the delays, but there is nothing I can do about it.

Bookmark

In other news, INAP is in the process of a major overhaul including a complete rewrite of most of its antiquated structure. When this process is complete it will be rebranded to demonstrate the totality of its features (it won’t be called INAP anymore because the name is too restrictive), but will be released as version 3.0

Bookmark

I almost cried. That description fits only the 1.0 version of INAP that was released over a year ago–now it does so much more than that that it is almost like saying Google is just a search engine. Oh well, the traffic generated was good quality.

In other news, version 2.4.25 was released a couple days ago to fix a bug that occurs when submitting a comment using the jQuery library under IE6. I think bugfixes this specific really showcase how mature the plugin has become, so if you have used it in the past, but stopped because of bugs, why not try it again?

Bookmark

If you are upgrading or have ever installed INAP before follow the upgrade instructions here.

Please report bugs as soon as you find them, as I will be making bug-fixing releases as they are fixed.

I am also specifically asking for feature ideas for the next version, so drop a note on the main page if you have any.

Bookmark