Warning! Boring techie post

Mar 5, 2009

This post is for the software folks out there.

I wanted to give a shout out to Google (represented by Jim amongst the readers of this blog). Google does the following things related to this blog:

It hosts the images (via Picasa Web Albums)
It hosts the videos (via YouTube)
It hosts the blog itself (via Blogger)
It provides the mechanisms used for two-way interaction (via Blogger comments and via Gmail)
It hosts the spreadsheet that tracks Maya’s feeding and generates/hosts the related pretty coloured graphs (via Google Docs)
It draws the embedded maps I use (via Google Maps)
It provides the software used to organize and edit my photo/video collection (via Picasa)
Probably the most important point… it crucially provides an easy way for Rebecca to post blog entries with no help from me that include text and photos without knowing anything about Web programming (also via Picasa)

The amazing thing is that Google does all of this for me for free. I knew that Google provided such features for years now, but it hadn’t really sunk in till I started thinking about getting this blog going and researched hosting alternatives. The fact that I don’t have to host and maintain my own web and mail server (let alone some video streaming solution), pay for the associated bandwidth costs, and - as a bonus - get far better uptime than I’d be able to provide by myself is actually quite stunningly cool. (Yes, I know, I’m essentially pointing out the virtues of any Web 2.0 social networking site - like, say, facebook - but that doesn’t make this any less cool.)

Maya even gets to wear Google clothing (courtesy of Jim). :)

Anyway, enough about Google.

I’m a CSS retard, so if anyone has suggestions on how to improve the usability/overall design, I’ll be happy to hear them. (I’m going to be changing the template soon, and can incorporate other changes at that time.) Moreover, if someone out there is less of a CSS retard than me, and is willing to offer a helping hand, I’ll take it. I’m trying very hard to not get bitten by any browser-specific issues (the one currently hovering in front of me is the lack of support for alpha transparency for PNG images in IE6; this is preventing me from designing a better banner image), so running anything targeted for a given browser is a no-no; other than that, everything is fair game.