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What is the sound of an unannounced feature going away?

Soon after the GooglePages service had been launched, two types of “alternate” URLs were discovered for published GooglePages. First, each username.googlepages.com page was mirrored as username.pagetastic.com. The second type of alternate URLs could be constructed by inserting any number of periods within username, e.g., user.name.googlepages.com was the same as username.googlepages.com.

URLs of the second type no longer work. This is not a big deal, since the only people affected are those who have used the alternate forms, such as user.name.googlepages.com, in the actual links. This feature, however, was convenient in some cases, e.g., for breaking up long.googlepage.names.

Which brings me back to the question that started the post: will Google remove some of the other unannounced features from GooglePages or other Google services? Technically, this is not unexpected for “beta” services, but so far most of the “beta” features that users found helpful were kept intact or improved, not removed.

One possible reason for changing this particular feature is that, as many people pointed out, it technically violated Google’s own policy against creating many copies of a website with identical content, but under different URLs. So one can hope that other useful hacks developed for GooglePages will remain intact and eventually will be officially supported. But until GooglePages graduate from “beta”, perhaps, it is a good idea to periodically check if pages that make use of other unannounced features of GooglePages and Google Page Creator continue to work properly.

Google Page Creator no longer removes JavaScript from GooglePages. Useful tools and active content, such as, Google Analytics, StatCounter, AdSense, Flash animation, and various JS widgets can now be added to any GooglePage (including the default home page) without resorting to hacks or manually uploaded HTML.

The detailed description of this new feature is too long to be posted here, so it is presented on GooglePage eXplorer website, including tutorials with specific instructions for adding JavaScript code for:

• JavaScript
• Google Analytics
• StatCounter
• AdSense

The following how-to briefly describes the suggested procedure for adding JS content to GooglePages. This procedure is generally safe for creating or editing any GooglePage, but it is strongly recommended to read the associated warnings and caveats before editing any functionally-important GooglePages, especially the default “home” page.

• use Firefox to avoid the GPC browser bugs in IE
• prepare the HTML code for each of the GooglePage fields in an external editor (Notepad will do, but something more powerful, e.g., PSPad, will be more convenient for editing many HTML files)
• create a new empty GooglePage in Google Page Creator
• use HTML Editor window to paste the prepared HTML code into each field
• do not use the WYSIWYG interface to edit any fields with JS code or custom formatting options
• note that most of the active JS content (e.g., AdSense) will not be actually displayed in the WYSIWYG window, which is normal, in fact, desirable behavior (see GPC JS execution bug description for details)
• “Publish” the GooglePage, but do not go “Back to Page Manager”
• use the “View Live” link (not “Preview”) to look at the published page
• make any changes in the external text editor and paste the revised HTML code into the appropriate fields using the HTML Editor window
• “Publish” the page and “View Live” to examine it again
• repeat the last two steps until the published page looks as desired
• use “Back to Page Manager” when finished
• the GooglePage with JS code has been created!

Do not open a GooglePage with active JS elements for editing in GPC, because JS code may become corrupted. If such a page needs to be edited, delete the existing page and re-create it from scratch as described above (using the backup or revised HTML code). The default “home” page cannot be deleted, if it needs to be recovered after a JS bug, therefore it is critical to learn about the uneditable field bug before adding JS code to the homepage.

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