Ok so two weeks have gone by since I have fooled around with Rebit. I have not connected the external HD at all because I figured I have not done that much on my PC that needs backing up. At work I am network connected and so most of the things I change are on a network drive or on a web server.
Anyway tonight I plugged in the HD and figured I would let it run for a bit to back up anything new. I was surprised that I didn't seen any activity on my computer (the external drive has a little light but it's hard to tell if it's actually writing or just powered up and spinning.) I looked for a Rebit icon in the system tray and didn't see one. Not remembering all about my initial experience two weeks ago, it took me a few minutes to realize that Rebit was plugging away backing up my data. It was totally transparent to me as the user!
I guess that is a nice feature, but I do wonder how I will know when it's done backing up. I opened Task Manager and looked at the running processes (for All users not the Win7 default of just my user ID.) Sure enough there was a Rebit-SaveMe-Svc.exe processing using 10 - 15% utilization, and when I listened closely to the external HD then I could hear it writing.
I don't think it will take long to back up because there should not be a lot of data changed. Anyway I just wanted to share that this really does not require any user intervention other than plugging in an external drive. I think the question users will have, especially if they back up more than one computer with the drive will be, "How do I know when it's done?"
A bit later I actually rebooted my laptop. When I originally plugged in the external HD the laptop was already booted up and I just hot-plugged the USB-connected HD. The Rebit icon in the system tray did not appear at that point. But when I rebooted my laptop and logged in with the external HD connected then the Rebit icon did appear in the system tray. It is basically a status icon, and otherwise does not provide functionality such as performing the backup. But this status icon does make it easier to see whether the backup is complete or not. If you right-click it and choose properties then it will indicate the date and time when the backup was complete (Protected as of...) and if you click the Rebit SaveMe tab then it will show you the last recovery points. So for the curious user who wants to know if their backup is done so they can disconnect and move the HD to another laptop, this would be one place to look.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Checking out Rebit SaveMe
One of my colleagues who works in Africa recently shared his findings with me about some really easy-to-use backup software called Rebit. He said that it was very easy to install and fully automated, designed for full recovery of Windows XP / Vista / Win7 computers. I decided to test out this software and figured I might as well share my installation experience with you as I set it up for the first time.
It is meant to be a stand-alone solution, not something you run over a network. We need a solution like this for staff working in remote parts of the world. It needs to be simple to install and require virtually no user intervention to keep running, and it needs to be fairly inexpensive for this specific need. We have learned from experience that if the user has to do something to initiate a backup, it will never happen.
The user does need to have a spare hard disk to back up to, like an external USB hard drive. They leave their external HD connected to their computer for most of the time and the backup occurs automatically in the background. If the internal boot drive fails or data gets corrupted or deleted then to do a full restore the process is to insert the Rebit SaveMe CD and boot on it. Then connect the external hard drive and the software will step the user through the restoration process.
I decided to purchase and test out SaveMe along with others who I work with at JAARS, to actually do a backup of a computer and then to test the restore process. I'm daring (or maybe just ignorant) so I am using my production laptop that I use every day for work. I'm not saying that I will trash and restore my work laptop - at least not yet! But to get familiar with the installation and operations I put it on my real computer to see how it works in real life.
This software can be purchased in two flavors:
I purchased the SaveMe software (the 6 computer version) because we wanted to test this out with multiple computers. I already have a 500 GB external USB HD, so following the instructions that came with the CD, I first connected my external HD before installing the software. I'm running this on Windows 7, 32-bit by the way.
Installation
When I stuck the CD into the computer the Autorun program prompted me about installing Rebit SaveMe.
The installation program ran through its steps prompting me to click Next at the opening screen.
Then it asked to confirm which external disk drive I wanted to install the software on. It installs on the external HD, not on your local boot drive - in fact C: is not even listed as an option.
I selected the drive to install it on, and when prompted I accepted the license agreement.
The program installed in about 15 seconds and then presented me with the Finish screen.
On that screen there is a single check-box option titled "Backup this computer to the Rebit SaveMe drive." The box is checked by default so all I had to do was click Finish.
After that the program began to start backing up my laptop.
A window popped up automatically and then became minimized to the taskbar.
I had task manager running and for about 30 seconds the utilization on my laptop varied between 50% and 90% as the app created a system restore point.
Then a window popped up asking for the license key. The key comes with the software package, so I entered that and clicked OK.
After this the program disappeared from the taskbar and a new icon showed up in the System Tray area.
The icon is the image of a green frog.
Operation and Performance
In the background the program (actually a service) backed up transparently, fluctuating between about 0 and 18% of system utilization (of course that will vary with other computers.)
Task manager showed that the application uses 5 processes:
Process Name Owner Memory Used
When I hovered my mouse over the icon in the System Tray, a box pops up listing the status of the backup with the number of remaining files to backup being shown. I was able to keep working, typing this blog and checking my Outlook e-mail just fine while the backup was running. At a fairly low percentage of CPU it was not noticeable. Maybe if I was doing other heavy disk operations I would have felt the load but my guess is that they run it with a fairly low priority since it's designed to run all the time in the background.
Right-clicking on the SaveMe icon gives options to Open the backed up information, Disconnect the external drive, About, and a More menu with options to Set a Password, Remove a PC, or Select the drive to backup. Also a Properties option is listed and the option to Check for Updates.
Storage on the External Drive
Prior to installation, I wondered if this program would automatically wipe the existing data which was on my external hard drive. The quick start instructions didn't mention anything about that. I had a prior disk image on the drive which took up about 100 GB, leaving around 400 GB available for other data. If it was wiped it was no big deal, but I left it there to see what would happen. It turns out that the SaveMe software just installs on the hard drive in addition to what is already there, without deleting any of the existing data.
SaveMe uses free space on the external HD but when you look at the drive with Windows Explorer it does not show the data that gets backed up in any usable fashion. The backup image shows up in Explorer as a virtual drive titled Rebit SaveMe. If you click on that drive once the backup is complete then it shows the computer name that was backed up and within that you can drill down to the C: drive or the Desktop or Documents shortcuts.
My C: drive had about 57 Gig of space in use. I would expect this to take a number of hours to backup. After 1.5 hours it was about 1/3 backed up, but 4 hours later it was totally finished so I'm not sure exactly how long it took. At first look I think that it is also doing some compression because it reports the final data is just using 48 Gig of space rather than the 57 Gig in use on the real C: drive.
Restoration and Recovery
I will document my findings on this once I test it out.
It is meant to be a stand-alone solution, not something you run over a network. We need a solution like this for staff working in remote parts of the world. It needs to be simple to install and require virtually no user intervention to keep running, and it needs to be fairly inexpensive for this specific need. We have learned from experience that if the user has to do something to initiate a backup, it will never happen.
The user does need to have a spare hard disk to back up to, like an external USB hard drive. They leave their external HD connected to their computer for most of the time and the backup occurs automatically in the background. If the internal boot drive fails or data gets corrupted or deleted then to do a full restore the process is to insert the Rebit SaveMe CD and boot on it. Then connect the external hard drive and the software will step the user through the restoration process.
I decided to purchase and test out SaveMe along with others who I work with at JAARS, to actually do a backup of a computer and then to test the restore process. I'm daring (or maybe just ignorant) so I am using my production laptop that I use every day for work. I'm not saying that I will trash and restore my work laptop - at least not yet! But to get familiar with the installation and operations I put it on my real computer to see how it works in real life.
This software can be purchased in two flavors:
- SaveMe software, currently priced at $39.99 which backs up a primary computer to the external HD plus up to 5 other computers. They each back up by connecting the HD to each computer one at a time, not over a network. This could be an inexpensive solution for small workgroups, although it would require enough human intervention to plug the HD into each computer to let the backup run.
- SaveMe Express which is priced at $29.95 and designed to back up an individual computer.
I purchased the SaveMe software (the 6 computer version) because we wanted to test this out with multiple computers. I already have a 500 GB external USB HD, so following the instructions that came with the CD, I first connected my external HD before installing the software. I'm running this on Windows 7, 32-bit by the way.
Installation
When I stuck the CD into the computer the Autorun program prompted me about installing Rebit SaveMe.
The installation program ran through its steps prompting me to click Next at the opening screen.
Then it asked to confirm which external disk drive I wanted to install the software on. It installs on the external HD, not on your local boot drive - in fact C: is not even listed as an option.
I selected the drive to install it on, and when prompted I accepted the license agreement.
The program installed in about 15 seconds and then presented me with the Finish screen.
On that screen there is a single check-box option titled "Backup this computer to the Rebit SaveMe drive." The box is checked by default so all I had to do was click Finish.
After that the program began to start backing up my laptop.
A window popped up automatically and then became minimized to the taskbar.
I had task manager running and for about 30 seconds the utilization on my laptop varied between 50% and 90% as the app created a system restore point.
Then a window popped up asking for the license key. The key comes with the software package, so I entered that and clicked OK.
After this the program disappeared from the taskbar and a new icon showed up in the System Tray area.
The icon is the image of a green frog.
Operation and Performance
In the background the program (actually a service) backed up transparently, fluctuating between about 0 and 18% of system utilization (of course that will vary with other computers.)
Task manager showed that the application uses 5 processes:
Process Name Owner Memory Used
- rbvss.exe System 24,108 KB
- Rebit-SaveMe-Autoplay.exe (me the user) 3,436 KB
- Rebit-SaveMe-Svc.exe System 8,808 KB
- Rebit-SaveMe-SysMon.exe System 2,168 KB
- Rebit-SaveMe-Tray.exe (me the user) 3,168 KB
When I hovered my mouse over the icon in the System Tray, a box pops up listing the status of the backup with the number of remaining files to backup being shown. I was able to keep working, typing this blog and checking my Outlook e-mail just fine while the backup was running. At a fairly low percentage of CPU it was not noticeable. Maybe if I was doing other heavy disk operations I would have felt the load but my guess is that they run it with a fairly low priority since it's designed to run all the time in the background.
Right-clicking on the SaveMe icon gives options to Open the backed up information, Disconnect the external drive, About, and a More menu with options to Set a Password, Remove a PC, or Select the drive to backup. Also a Properties option is listed and the option to Check for Updates.
Storage on the External Drive
Prior to installation, I wondered if this program would automatically wipe the existing data which was on my external hard drive. The quick start instructions didn't mention anything about that. I had a prior disk image on the drive which took up about 100 GB, leaving around 400 GB available for other data. If it was wiped it was no big deal, but I left it there to see what would happen. It turns out that the SaveMe software just installs on the hard drive in addition to what is already there, without deleting any of the existing data.
SaveMe uses free space on the external HD but when you look at the drive with Windows Explorer it does not show the data that gets backed up in any usable fashion. The backup image shows up in Explorer as a virtual drive titled Rebit SaveMe. If you click on that drive once the backup is complete then it shows the computer name that was backed up and within that you can drill down to the C: drive or the Desktop or Documents shortcuts.
My C: drive had about 57 Gig of space in use. I would expect this to take a number of hours to backup. After 1.5 hours it was about 1/3 backed up, but 4 hours later it was totally finished so I'm not sure exactly how long it took. At first look I think that it is also doing some compression because it reports the final data is just using 48 Gig of space rather than the 57 Gig in use on the real C: drive.
Restoration and Recovery
I will document my findings on this once I test it out.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Playing with VirtualBox
I have begun to experiment with VirtualBox as a virtualization tool for testing OS's on my computer. I previously used the free versions of MSVS and VMWare but as VirtualBox is gaining popularity I wanted to get some experience with it.
A couple of weeks ago I received a new laptop at work with Win7 on it. My prior laptop had been running Win7 RC which was due to expire at the end of February. On the old laptop I had been running a free version of VMWare Server to host a few virtual machines for testing out Windows Server 2003 and a CentOS distro. I had ported those VMs over my last two laptops running XP and onto the Win7 RC system with VMWare Server, which saved quite a bit of installation and setup time for these test VMs. Under VMWare they ran just fine on a Core2Duo laptop with 2GB of RAM. They were not blazing fast of course but my needs were not for performance but simply for occasional testing of OS functionality.
Rather than install VMWare on my new laptop I decided to try out VirtualBox to see what its pros and cons were and how effective (or painful) it might be to use. This software is something that we are thinking about recommending to some of our field IT staff as a useful tool for them to gain experience with new OS's without having to dedicate additional precious hardware. In our office we have pretty strong Linux skills and most of our production systems are virtualized with Xen on CentOS. We have had some discussions about moving toward KVM as it will be better supported in CentOS in the longer term, but when it comes to VMs on workstations most of the team are using VirtualBox.
This blog entry documents my notes along the way of installing and learning VirtualBox. I hope they will be of use to others who are also considering this technology.
I Googled VirtualBox and then downloaded the 3.1.4 version's 72 Meg Windows binary installer from the web site. While it was downloading, I reviewed the FAQs for Windows (nothing of critical issue - use dynamic disk sizes versus fixed) and also grabbed a copy of the User Manual PDF, both from the official web site.
Side Note:
Installation
I installed the software with the default settings. It does warn that during the installation of the networking components you will be temporarily disconnected from the network, so I saved any open files (this blog) and closed other programs like Outlook, which gets unhappy when it looses its MAPI connection to the server... Windows security prompted me 4 times during the installation process about allowing drivers to be installed for USB and network support, but the installation was straight forward. I wonder how much overhead the VirtualBox network drivers will take up. The VMWare Server network drivers caused my prior XP and Win7 PCs to boot up and shut down noticeably slower. After finishing the installation, launching the program and navigating through the registration box, I was presented with the VirtualBox UI.
I browsed around the application menus a bit - shucks, you can't import VMWare VMs. I was sort of hoping something like this would be available as it would save me some long install and configuration processes, but it's understandable how impossible it might be to import an image from another technology and actually make it work! Next I looked at my laptop's network drivers to see what damage it did to the stack of drivers. I noticed in VirtualBox that its default network interface was a host-only adapter (file / preferences / network) but it does support virtual NAT and Bridged networking option, very similar to VMWare.
Sure enough a new VirtualBox Host-Only Network connection showed up in my list of network connections, and each of my real network connections (Wireless and Gigabit Ethernet) included a new driver which was enabled and named VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver. I noticed that it did not try to add the driver to my VPN connections and while this driver was on the list in the Bluetooth networking connection, its check box was not enabled. From a CMD prompt, IPConfig /all shows a list of network adapters that is nearly 100 lines long now. With all the IPv6 stuff the list was over 80 lines long before VirtualBox was installed, so yes it's one more adapter, but it's just one in a long list. We're not in Windows 3.1 any more, baby!
A First Test: Ubuntu
I decided to set up an Ubuntu VM first. I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu and found something else to work on for about 20 minutes while the 680MB ISO image downloaded...
I then created a new VM in VirtualBox by clicking the New button and selecting the Linux Ubuntu OS from the menus that followed. I used the defaults of 384kb of RAM and 8GB for the boot drive (that sounds awfully large to me but I decided to use the defaults.) When I clicked the Start button to start the machine it took me into a First Run Wizard which walked me through setting up the install process to boot from the ISO image I downloaded and begin the Ubuntu installation. There was no need to burn the image to a CD and then boot from the CD in the VM; that would just be dumb. When selecting the drive to use there is an icon to the right which takes you into the Virtual Media Manager and allows you to point to an ISO image and treat it like a CD drive.
Once the installation started, VirtualBox complained a bit that the display mode was only 16-bit and not 32-bit but that was only because of the Ubuntu install process and the notice messages that appeared could be ignored. The ISO image was read and it did a quick virtual boot to itself, resulting in an Ubuntu GUI screen with an icon to Install Ubuntu. I double-clicked the icon (after seeing a message about how the keyboard and mouse clicks get captured, and clicking 'do not show again' then continuing.) This launched the actual Ubuntu install process. After answering a few basic prompts for my user name and what to call the computer (the VM that is) the standard Ubuntu installation took place. This took a bit of time, but when it was done it prompted to reboot.
The first reboot prompted to remove the CD and then press Enter. I had read that the First Run Wizard would automatically unmount the ISO image after the install was complete so I didn't have to do anything but just press Enter and my Ubuntu VM booted up. This was fairly straight forward. After a bit Ubuntu prompted to download and install patches & updates (158MB of them, 227 packages!) and I let it do that. It had correctly found its way to the network through VirtualBox's virtual NAT driver so that was working great.
While it was doing that I poked around a bit to find out how to install the VirtualBox additions. Every VM technology I have used has additional hooks that should be installed on the guest OS to help improve performance and functionality in a virtualized environment. On the VirtualBox menu for the guest machine (top of the window, Devices menu) I noticed an 'Install Guest Additions...' menu item and I assume that's what I should do, at least without reading any documentation. But first I will wait until those 227 updated packages get done being installed!
Once the updates were complete and Ubuntu prompted to reboot then I logged in and proceeded with installing the guest additions.
When I clicked that option, Ubuntu displayed the prompt in the image at the right. I clicked OK and then opened the VboxAdditions_3 CD image. The autorun process did not execute on its own so I ran autorun.sh and provided my admin credentials. This script installed the VirtualBox additions for Ubuntu. When it completed it prompted that they would take effect upon the next restart so I restarted Ubuntu. After that the integration of the keyboard and mouse worked seamlessly with the VM and other applications running on Win7.
If I get around to installing other distros or Windows VMs I will post my findings with those as well.
A couple of weeks ago I received a new laptop at work with Win7 on it. My prior laptop had been running Win7 RC which was due to expire at the end of February. On the old laptop I had been running a free version of VMWare Server to host a few virtual machines for testing out Windows Server 2003 and a CentOS distro. I had ported those VMs over my last two laptops running XP and onto the Win7 RC system with VMWare Server, which saved quite a bit of installation and setup time for these test VMs. Under VMWare they ran just fine on a Core2Duo laptop with 2GB of RAM. They were not blazing fast of course but my needs were not for performance but simply for occasional testing of OS functionality.
Rather than install VMWare on my new laptop I decided to try out VirtualBox to see what its pros and cons were and how effective (or painful) it might be to use. This software is something that we are thinking about recommending to some of our field IT staff as a useful tool for them to gain experience with new OS's without having to dedicate additional precious hardware. In our office we have pretty strong Linux skills and most of our production systems are virtualized with Xen on CentOS. We have had some discussions about moving toward KVM as it will be better supported in CentOS in the longer term, but when it comes to VMs on workstations most of the team are using VirtualBox.
This blog entry documents my notes along the way of installing and learning VirtualBox. I hope they will be of use to others who are also considering this technology.
I Googled VirtualBox and then downloaded the 3.1.4 version's 72 Meg Windows binary installer from the web site. While it was downloading, I reviewed the FAQs for Windows (nothing of critical issue - use dynamic disk sizes versus fixed) and also grabbed a copy of the User Manual PDF, both from the official web site.
Side Note:
By the way, I'm running Win7 32-bit, as my experience with the 64-bit RC revealed that too few applications are actually available in 64-bit flavors to make it worth the trouble. It doesn't appear that VirtualBox is available for Intel 64-bit Win7 (AMD64 yes, but I don't see references to Intel 64.) I don't yet know if the 32-bit VirtualBox will run under 64-bit Win7 in 32-bit mode. It's for reasons exactly like this that I decided to stick with 32-bit Win7 for now. While Win7 64-bit did run most 32-bit apps without trouble, there were enough installation quirks and a big lack of available apps that actually would benefit at all from 64-bit performance, so I decided to step back to 32-bit for a while until the market matures a bit more.
Installation
I installed the software with the default settings. It does warn that during the installation of the networking components you will be temporarily disconnected from the network, so I saved any open files (this blog) and closed other programs like Outlook, which gets unhappy when it looses its MAPI connection to the server... Windows security prompted me 4 times during the installation process about allowing drivers to be installed for USB and network support, but the installation was straight forward. I wonder how much overhead the VirtualBox network drivers will take up. The VMWare Server network drivers caused my prior XP and Win7 PCs to boot up and shut down noticeably slower. After finishing the installation, launching the program and navigating through the registration box, I was presented with the VirtualBox UI.
I browsed around the application menus a bit - shucks, you can't import VMWare VMs. I was sort of hoping something like this would be available as it would save me some long install and configuration processes, but it's understandable how impossible it might be to import an image from another technology and actually make it work! Next I looked at my laptop's network drivers to see what damage it did to the stack of drivers. I noticed in VirtualBox that its default network interface was a host-only adapter (file / preferences / network) but it does support virtual NAT and Bridged networking option, very similar to VMWare.
Sure enough a new VirtualBox Host-Only Network connection showed up in my list of network connections, and each of my real network connections (Wireless and Gigabit Ethernet) included a new driver which was enabled and named VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver. I noticed that it did not try to add the driver to my VPN connections and while this driver was on the list in the Bluetooth networking connection, its check box was not enabled. From a CMD prompt, IPConfig /all shows a list of network adapters that is nearly 100 lines long now. With all the IPv6 stuff the list was over 80 lines long before VirtualBox was installed, so yes it's one more adapter, but it's just one in a long list. We're not in Windows 3.1 any more, baby!
A First Test: Ubuntu
I decided to set up an Ubuntu VM first. I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu and found something else to work on for about 20 minutes while the 680MB ISO image downloaded...
I then created a new VM in VirtualBox by clicking the New button and selecting the Linux Ubuntu OS from the menus that followed. I used the defaults of 384kb of RAM and 8GB for the boot drive (that sounds awfully large to me but I decided to use the defaults.) When I clicked the Start button to start the machine it took me into a First Run Wizard which walked me through setting up the install process to boot from the ISO image I downloaded and begin the Ubuntu installation. There was no need to burn the image to a CD and then boot from the CD in the VM; that would just be dumb. When selecting the drive to use there is an icon to the right which takes you into the Virtual Media Manager and allows you to point to an ISO image and treat it like a CD drive.
Once the installation started, VirtualBox complained a bit that the display mode was only 16-bit and not 32-bit but that was only because of the Ubuntu install process and the notice messages that appeared could be ignored. The ISO image was read and it did a quick virtual boot to itself, resulting in an Ubuntu GUI screen with an icon to Install Ubuntu. I double-clicked the icon (after seeing a message about how the keyboard and mouse clicks get captured, and clicking 'do not show again' then continuing.) This launched the actual Ubuntu install process. After answering a few basic prompts for my user name and what to call the computer (the VM that is) the standard Ubuntu installation took place. This took a bit of time, but when it was done it prompted to reboot.
The first reboot prompted to remove the CD and then press Enter. I had read that the First Run Wizard would automatically unmount the ISO image after the install was complete so I didn't have to do anything but just press Enter and my Ubuntu VM booted up. This was fairly straight forward. After a bit Ubuntu prompted to download and install patches & updates (158MB of them, 227 packages!) and I let it do that. It had correctly found its way to the network through VirtualBox's virtual NAT driver so that was working great.
While it was doing that I poked around a bit to find out how to install the VirtualBox additions. Every VM technology I have used has additional hooks that should be installed on the guest OS to help improve performance and functionality in a virtualized environment. On the VirtualBox menu for the guest machine (top of the window, Devices menu) I noticed an 'Install Guest Additions...' menu item and I assume that's what I should do, at least without reading any documentation. But first I will wait until those 227 updated packages get done being installed!
Once the updates were complete and Ubuntu prompted to reboot then I logged in and proceeded with installing the guest additions.
When I clicked that option, Ubuntu displayed the prompt in the image at the right. I clicked OK and then opened the VboxAdditions_3 CD image. The autorun process did not execute on its own so I ran autorun.sh and provided my admin credentials. This script installed the VirtualBox additions for Ubuntu. When it completed it prompted that they would take effect upon the next restart so I restarted Ubuntu. After that the integration of the keyboard and mouse worked seamlessly with the VM and other applications running on Win7.If I get around to installing other distros or Windows VMs I will post my findings with those as well.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
My Experience Starting With Google Sites
Yesterday I launched our new web site, www.hankscott.org which gives an overview of our missions work with Wycliffe Bible Translators and JAARS. We will use that web site for posting future prayer updates, newsletters, and family photo albums.
I decided to try out Google Sites as a replacement for our old site which was set up on another site which provided a template-based web service similar to Google Sites. I was getting tired of the limitations of the old site, and paying $9.95 per month for technology which had not been updated in about 6 years. It was becoming increasingly difficult to post updates because the administrative tools on the old site didn't work with Firefox nor did they work in IE8! Now that I have completed the setup of our new site, I see the old site's tools have been updated and they are compatible with both of those browsers. Still I will be glad not to have to pay $10/mo for basic web services which Google provides for free.
Google sites has a lot of limitations when compared with other fully open web tools, but it also has some very nice things that are built in. I didn't want to have to fully develop a web site from scratch, since I have other things to do with my time. So using a forms-based or template-based site like Google Sites is fine for my fairly basic web posting needs. I was able to get a web site up and running with a number of nice features in my spare time over just a few days. It would have taken me ages to develop something from scratch because I don't have a lot of web development experience.
Google makes it very easy to integrate Google Analytics with Google Sites, so I can gather basic usage tracking stats to see if anyone is actually going to the site. This is important because a lot of people on our mailing list only receive the electronic version of our newsletter, and rather than sending it as an attachment, I post it on the web site and then send out a short e-mail with a link to the newsletter page on the web site. This is so that they might get drawn in to other things I have posted which they might find of interest (family photos, more advanced articles about technology for those interested, etc.)
Google also made it easy to use the Google Webmaster tools to generate an XML sitemap which can be submitted to the public Google search engine for crawling. I submitted it a couple of days ago. Thus far the site has not been crawled yet, but I assume it is in the queue.
It's nice that Google Sites also has gadgets which can easily be inserted to link to Picasa where we already had a number of photo albums. And the template we used had a 'Contact Us' form included which when filled out sends an update to a Google Docs spreadsheet. I have flagged that document to send an e-mail alert to my Gmail account when it gets updated. So when someone fills out the Contact Us form and submits it, I get an e-mail letting me know about the update, and then I can look at the spreadsheet in Google Docs to read their comment. That is much better than posting our e-mail address on the site and letting the bots find it. I did put our cell phone numbers up there and links to our Facebook profiles, but as yet I don't think the bots take advantage of those things.
I was able to purchase a domain and link it to my Google site so people can access it with the domain name rather than the longer and somewhat more complicated Google Site name. One limitation I found with this is that the domain name needs to begin with www. That is becoming less and less common these days, but due to Google's design the official name needs to be www.something.xyz rather than just something.xyz. But in my domain I was able to forward requests to hankscott.org to www.hankscott.org. So if people browse by dropping the leading www they will still get to the site. Not a show stopper.
Google sites also lets people who have Google accounts post comments on pages, if I configure the page to have a comments option on it. And if people want RSS updates they can go to our What's New page and subscribe for RSS. I didn't see a way to send e-mail updates through the site though, just RSS. For pages which use a File Folder template (like our Newsletters page) people can subscribe for e-mail updates if files get changed, but I think that only applies if they have a Google account and sign in with it.
One of the shortcomings of Google Sites is that it has a very limited security model for viewers. Either the whole site can be open to the world, or it can be limited to only those with Google accounts, or it can be closed so only I can see it. It cannot (as far as I can tell) have pages which are open to some and restricted to others, at least not to the general public. In our former web site we could have people sign in and create accounts, then we could make certain things available to them, but not to the world. But we didn't use that feature much because I found that a lot of people didn't want to sign in, and therefore were missing a lot of the info that I posted in a more restricted fashion. So I had already switched to posting everything publicly.
With Google Sites I can create a page that is not shown in the navigation. So general users won't stumble across it through browsing the site. But it does show up in the sitemap, so I have decided not to include a sitemap link on our site. Also thus far I have not found a way to restrict those pages from Google crawls. I supposed I could figure out how to edit the XML sitemap which gets submitted to Google for crawling, but that gets updated whenever I change the site, so that's not a good solution either. The other option is to use Meta flags on those pages, which I have not figured out how to do in Google Sites yet either. The site does have a default robots.txt (the most common method to limiting crawler activity) but it cannot be edited, or again I have not found a way to edit it.
Google Sites is not perfect, but it meets my needs and it's free! It integrates well with other Google products, and seems fairly extensible at least for my basic needs. Other people have developed a lot of templates and gadgets for it and I suspect that it will continue to be updated with features at technology grows over time. So for now it looks like a pretty good solution.
I decided to try out Google Sites as a replacement for our old site which was set up on another site which provided a template-based web service similar to Google Sites. I was getting tired of the limitations of the old site, and paying $9.95 per month for technology which had not been updated in about 6 years. It was becoming increasingly difficult to post updates because the administrative tools on the old site didn't work with Firefox nor did they work in IE8! Now that I have completed the setup of our new site, I see the old site's tools have been updated and they are compatible with both of those browsers. Still I will be glad not to have to pay $10/mo for basic web services which Google provides for free.
Google sites has a lot of limitations when compared with other fully open web tools, but it also has some very nice things that are built in. I didn't want to have to fully develop a web site from scratch, since I have other things to do with my time. So using a forms-based or template-based site like Google Sites is fine for my fairly basic web posting needs. I was able to get a web site up and running with a number of nice features in my spare time over just a few days. It would have taken me ages to develop something from scratch because I don't have a lot of web development experience.
Google makes it very easy to integrate Google Analytics with Google Sites, so I can gather basic usage tracking stats to see if anyone is actually going to the site. This is important because a lot of people on our mailing list only receive the electronic version of our newsletter, and rather than sending it as an attachment, I post it on the web site and then send out a short e-mail with a link to the newsletter page on the web site. This is so that they might get drawn in to other things I have posted which they might find of interest (family photos, more advanced articles about technology for those interested, etc.)
Google also made it easy to use the Google Webmaster tools to generate an XML sitemap which can be submitted to the public Google search engine for crawling. I submitted it a couple of days ago. Thus far the site has not been crawled yet, but I assume it is in the queue.
It's nice that Google Sites also has gadgets which can easily be inserted to link to Picasa where we already had a number of photo albums. And the template we used had a 'Contact Us' form included which when filled out sends an update to a Google Docs spreadsheet. I have flagged that document to send an e-mail alert to my Gmail account when it gets updated. So when someone fills out the Contact Us form and submits it, I get an e-mail letting me know about the update, and then I can look at the spreadsheet in Google Docs to read their comment. That is much better than posting our e-mail address on the site and letting the bots find it. I did put our cell phone numbers up there and links to our Facebook profiles, but as yet I don't think the bots take advantage of those things.
I was able to purchase a domain and link it to my Google site so people can access it with the domain name rather than the longer and somewhat more complicated Google Site name. One limitation I found with this is that the domain name needs to begin with www. That is becoming less and less common these days, but due to Google's design the official name needs to be www.something.xyz rather than just something.xyz. But in my domain I was able to forward requests to hankscott.org to www.hankscott.org. So if people browse by dropping the leading www they will still get to the site. Not a show stopper.
Google sites also lets people who have Google accounts post comments on pages, if I configure the page to have a comments option on it. And if people want RSS updates they can go to our What's New page and subscribe for RSS. I didn't see a way to send e-mail updates through the site though, just RSS. For pages which use a File Folder template (like our Newsletters page) people can subscribe for e-mail updates if files get changed, but I think that only applies if they have a Google account and sign in with it.
One of the shortcomings of Google Sites is that it has a very limited security model for viewers. Either the whole site can be open to the world, or it can be limited to only those with Google accounts, or it can be closed so only I can see it. It cannot (as far as I can tell) have pages which are open to some and restricted to others, at least not to the general public. In our former web site we could have people sign in and create accounts, then we could make certain things available to them, but not to the world. But we didn't use that feature much because I found that a lot of people didn't want to sign in, and therefore were missing a lot of the info that I posted in a more restricted fashion. So I had already switched to posting everything publicly.
With Google Sites I can create a page that is not shown in the navigation. So general users won't stumble across it through browsing the site. But it does show up in the sitemap, so I have decided not to include a sitemap link on our site. Also thus far I have not found a way to restrict those pages from Google crawls. I supposed I could figure out how to edit the XML sitemap which gets submitted to Google for crawling, but that gets updated whenever I change the site, so that's not a good solution either. The other option is to use Meta flags on those pages, which I have not figured out how to do in Google Sites yet either. The site does have a default robots.txt (the most common method to limiting crawler activity) but it cannot be edited, or again I have not found a way to edit it.
Google Sites is not perfect, but it meets my needs and it's free! It integrates well with other Google products, and seems fairly extensible at least for my basic needs. Other people have developed a lot of templates and gadgets for it and I suspect that it will continue to be updated with features at technology grows over time. So for now it looks like a pretty good solution.
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