Free Website Building Tools That Are Good Replacements for Google Page Creator

Google Page Creator is awesome - anyone can build a good looking website in minutes using the built-in templates or they can write pages externally (say in Dreamweaver) and upload them to Creator.

And everything is free - there are no ads on your pages and Google takes care of all the web hosting bills. But as they say, all good things come to an end, and so is Google Page Creator getting replaced by Google Sites.

Compare Google Sites with Google Page Creator

While Google Sites and Google Pages have common feature (like the WYSIWYG AJAX editor), they are still quite different. For instance, you can’t upload HTML pages to Google Sites and are therefore limited to using one of the built-in themes for your site design.

The second issue is that if you make a Google Site public, the associated ’site activity log’ also becomes public - most website publisher will have reservations sharing this data with unknown visitors. Lastly, all external hyperlinks are ‘nofollow’ if that means anything to you.

Free Alternatives to Google Page Creator

Here’s a roundup of some website building services that are free and non-technical.

1. Office Live Small Business - While the name may suggest that the service is only for small business owners, just about anyone can create their website here.

 
Website Builder inside Office Live Small Business

Office Live is easy and filled with goodies - you have tons of professional web templates and color themes to choose from, there’re ready-made modules for common tasks like web forms, photo galleries, live maps,  email newsletters, etc. plus you can also upload office documents to the website.

Everything is free including web hosting and server space. See a sample site.

2. Weebly - This is powerful but very user friendly and easy web page builder where you start with a blank canvas and build the page by dragging elements that include text, videos, pictures, maps and more.

Geeks can write their own HTML and add them to Weebly pages. There’s support for Google ads as well so you can even monetize sites created inside Weebly. Another advantage - site publishers download their full site with pictures and CSS as a zip file. Free users gets 100 MB of free storage space and there’re no bandwidth limitations. See sample site.

3. Snap Pages - This is Flash based website editor that is very beautiful and may be a perfect place if you looking to create a small website for sharing some photos and your calendar. The options are slightly limited for non-premium users as they can’t create new pages. See sample site.

4. Edicy Pages - It’s a new website creation tool that is just perfect for the techie crowd who wants more control over their site layout.

Start by picking a design from the template gallery and then you may completely change the look and feel of your site by editing the blog template similar to WordPress themes or Blogger template. It also supports JavaScript code and like Google Sites, Edicy tracks all changes made to a site. See example site.

 

5. Synthasite - This is again an easy yet very powerful tool for building websites but unlike competition, Syntasite is completely free. Images uploaded to Synthasite can be diretly edited in Picnik just like you have in Flickr. The tool also lets you embed Google AdSense ads in web pages much like Weebly. See example site.

Some more site builders worth checking out are WebOn, WebSketch, Viviti, Wix and Webs.

• Know Everything about Websites
• How to Completely Test a Website

How to Clean Your Internet History in Firefox

Consider this - you are sharing a computer at home, there aren’t any separate user logins and all family members use the same Firefox browser to surf the web. How do you make sure that people don’t get to know about the websites you visited last night?

In other words, how can you selectively clear such tracks from the Firefox browser without deleting the entire web browsing history?

Forget about this Site

This option is recommended if you want to erase only a couple of websites from your browser’s history.

Press Ctrl+H to access your web history in the Firefox sidebar, type some characters in the search box to find the website(s) that you want to remove, right click and select the "Forget About This Site" option as shown in the screenshot.

This option lets you delete either entire domains (like google.com) or even sub-domains (like images.google.com) from your browser history.

*If you like to selectively delete only a couple of web pages from the history (and not the entire website), just right click the web page title in the History box and select Delete This Page or hit the Del key on your keyboard.

Clear History from the Last Hour

Your family members have gone shopping and you the refore spent the last two hours browsing the 18+ web. Fine but how you do make sure that all the tracks are erased before the door bell rings.

Simple. Press Ctrl+Shift+Del in Firefox to open the "Clear Recent History" dialog and select "the last two hours" or "my history for today" option. This will delete only your recent Internet history while leaving the old data untouched so your wife will still quickly access all her previously visited sites from the address bar.

Browse Privately in Firefox

Now in situations where you don’t want to take the risk of deleting history, activate the private browsing mode in Firefox by typing about:privatebrowsing in the address bar (or choose Private Browser from the Tools menu).

This is the safest option because none of your web activities will be recorded anywhere. The private mode is turned off automatically as soon you close the browser window.

Google Bus Will Introduce Internet to New Users in India

Google India has a launched a very unique initiative to educate the offline population in India about the benefits of Internet.
The project is called The Internet Bus and, as the name suggests, it’s a web connected bus that will travel to different cities of India giving people an opportunity to experience the Internet first hand through the various computers installed inside the bus.

Google Internet Bus in India

The Internet Bus website is available at google.co.in/internetbus where you can see the exact itinerary of the bus or check out Picasa for more photos of this Internet bus.

The bus was flagged from Chennai today and will cover most cities in the state of Tamil Nadu over the next six weeks. Prem Ramaswami & Srikanth Belwadi of Google India say that the bus will showcase Internet services like search, email, social networking, maps and others.

How to Read Popular Magazines on your Desktop for Free

This is a very simple & non-geeky trick to help you read the latest issue of popular magazines like PC Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Popular Mechanics, MacWorld, Lonely Planet, Reader’s Digest, etc without paying any subscription charges.

You will also get to read adult magazines like Playboy and Penthouse. Best of all, these digital magazines are exact replicas of print and served as high-resolution images that you can also download on to the computer for offline reading.

How to Read Online Magazines for Free

Step 1: If you are on a Windows PC, go to apple.com and download the Safari browser. Mac users already have Safari on their system.

Step 2: Once you install Safari, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced and check the option that says "Show Develop menu in menu bar."

Step 3: Open the "Develop" option in the browser menu bar and choose Mobile Safari 1.1.3 - iPhone as the User Agent.

Step 4: You’re all set. Open zinio.com/iphone inside Safari browser and start reading your favorite magazines for free. Use the navigation arrows at the top to turn pages.

For people in countries like India who are already subscribed to Zinio Digital Magazines, this hack is still useful because you get access to certain magazines which are otherwise not available for subscription via Zinio (e.g., Penthouse and Playboy).

Geeks may write a AutoHotKey script or create a "scrolling capture" profile in SnagIt that will auto-flip magazine pages and save all the images locally. Thanks Scott. And here’s a related trick on how to read Wall Street for free.