Gobán Saor » GAFyD

Google forgets to renew JotSpot domain!

Tom Gleeson — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:02:38 +0000

Over the weekend I dusted down my JotSpot Wiki, cleaned out some old Wiki pages and generally made it useful as a client collaboration tool. I created some new pages and few “project diary” type blog entries to do with a proposal for work. I also set up a potential client as a contributor and sat back to reap the collaborative benefits of one of the finer Wiki tools out there.

Unfortunately, by Monday afternoon all was not well. The jot.com domain no longer pointed at JotSpot, instead it was “parked” at Network Solutions a domain name registrar. Now this generally happens to domains when they’re not renewed or your credit card company refuses to honour your request for payment. If JotSpot were a two-guys-in-a-garret operation you could see how this could happen, but JotSpot is now owned by Google.

Google’s neglect of the product and its secrecy over future plans has been a major concern to the original service’s loyal, (but I would imagine, declining) user base, but yesterday that neglect hit a new low.

The problem was fixed relatively quickly, but due to DNS migration issues, 24 hours later, many users of the service are still locked out. That’s a problem, but hey, s**t happens. What’s really astounding is Google’s complete silence on the subject over on the JotSpot support forum.

Makes you wonder how much of your commercial or indeed personal data assets you should entrust with such an organisation. Big brother may be watching you, but he’s not about to demean himself by actually communicating with you.

I’ve had this sort of problem with another Google Apps services in the past and I’ve seen problems with gmail similar to those experienced by Jeff Nolan. I’m about to launch my www.gobansaor.com business site and my intention was to host it under Google Apps (which rumour has, will soon incorporate some variation on JotSpot). My dilemma is now whether to forge ahead with my original plan to use Google Apps or use a local Irish hosting service. Or, maybe I should fork out the $50 fee for the Google Apps Premier Edition with its “24/7 assistance, including phone support for critical issues”.

Decisions, decisions.

UPDATE:

Two days after the event, Google acknowledges the problem.

UPDATE: 28th Feb 2008

JotSpot is reborn as Google Sites.

Initial quick look; I like it, keeps a lot of the simplicity of the pure Wiki side of JotSpot (the “structured Wiki”as an alternative to a database/”application builder” is no more). But the integration with the rest of Google Docs is to be welcomed if a bit limited at the moment (documents must be published first from within Google Docs and their URLs then “cut and pasted” into the Sites application).

The new Google Spreadsheet’s forms functionality should make up for the loss of the JotSpot database functionality, at least for me. Having the ability to point a CNAME at the resulting wikis is also very useful for client project collaboration.

Zimki – R.I.P.

Tom Gleeson — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:16:18 +0000

Zimki, the London based innovative JavaScript application hosting service is to close down this Christmas Eve. Not surprising really, the announcement last June to stop the proposed open sourcing of the platform and the parent company’s (Canon Europe) decision to order a review on the future direction of Zimki looked ominous at the time. Ah well, at least my experimentation with Zimki has given me a very useful take-away, a real respect for the JavaScript language.

The reasonable notice period gives me plenty of time to find alternative hosting, I’ll more than likely give GAFyD another try; maybe JotSpot wiki will have been added to Google Apps by then allowing me to continue to use a hosted service to handle my online database application needs. If not, I may have to sign up for a bog-standard PHP hosting deal.

Google Apps not just for SMEs?

Tom Gleeson — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:53:59 +0000

The relentless positioning of Google Apps as an alternative to MS Office continues. Google has just announced the acquisition of Postini an on-demand hosted provider of secure communications (EMail and IM) for large corporate clients. The use of hosted email and document storage solution is a no-brainer for small businesses but compliance and data security worries hold back large companies from taking advantage of the cost benefits of Google Apps (although some large institutions like Trinity College Dublin have made the leap). I guess when Google incorporates Postini technology we’ll see a third Apps edition added to the existing standard and premium options, this time targeting the needs of large enterprises.

Zimki – trust and hope.

Tom Gleeson — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 11:34:40 +0000

Fotango‘s Chief Operating Officer, Simon Wardle, writes further about the decision to delay open sourcing Zimki on his personal blog. I’ve decided to look at the situation form a glass-half-full perspective; hey it’s still free, professionally managed, easy to use; I’ve some really useful web services running on it and the rest are static pages that I migrated from Google Apps a few months ago but could easily be moved back to Google or to a run-of-the-mill hosting provider.

OK maybe it’ll disappear in the future but I like the way Simon was up front about the problems, not ‘going to ground’ or worse using marketing-speak to promise vapour ware! So I’m going to trust that if the situation changes again that Fotango will give Zimki users sufficient notice to enable a orderly transition to an alternative platform but hope that they can eventually realise the potential of this innovative product.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets Help

Tom Gleeson — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 10:11:02 +0000

Most of the discussions about Google D&S tend to frame the conversation in relation to MS Office assuming prior knowledge of the likes of Excel and Word. But my wife, an IT Coach, is finding that more and more people who are drawn to first-time use of computers because of a wish to access the internet, are bypassing traditional desktop tools especially when she introduces them to Gmail and Google Docs & Spreadsheets. For these people teaching the use of Google D&S using Word & Excel as the template makes no sense so it’s good to see that Google has announced a Google Docs & Spreadsheets Help Group to provide help and guidance to users of the product.

What’s up Docs & Spreadsheets?

Tom Gleeson — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 11:40:18 +0000

Google Spreadsheets now supports simple graphs and named ranges; see the announcement on the google-d-s.blogspot.com blog. I’ve also just noticed that my Google Apps account now includes Docs & Spreadsheets; finally I can move my business documents from my private GMail account into Goggle Apps. Looks like a presentation tool is also on the way.

This confirmation of Google’s continued commitment to D&S is opportune as I had decided a few weeks ago to invest some time finally getting my head around GData, in particular, the Spreadsheets and Calendar APIs. I investigated the APIs using VBA, as my main interest in interfacing with GoogleD&S & Calendar is as a back-end to Excel; i.e. using Excel as the front-end heavy duty data tool and Google Apps as the collaboration and orchestration tool (and Amazon S3 as the back-end data store). But I didn’t use VBA within Excel, instead as I was also investigating Proto I used this excellent Proto example as my starting point.

NOTE:

Proto Discount:

Byron Binkley CEO of Proto has kindly offered a total of 50 licenses (until July 13th 2007) at $79.50, a 90% discount to the listed price for Proto Individual (http://www.protosw.com/products/purchase). The offer applies to anybody mentioning this http://gobansaor.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/proto/blog post. I have no connection financial or otherwise with Proto Software, just a fan of the product.

Google Apps for Your Domain and ROBOTS.TXT

Tom Gleeson — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:53:21 +0000

I’m a technical sort of guy, so when it comes to setting up a website the natural thing for me would be to build it using raw HTML/Javascript or maybe use a web framework such as Zimki, Ruby On Rails or MODx. But when it came to setting up a web presence for our new IT coaching business (helping individuals and VSBs – very small businesses – make use of IT ), I decided to use the type of service we would recommend to others. I picked Google Apps for Your Domain.

While the email and calendar facilities offered by Google Apps are superb and the web page building tools are easy to use, there is (or was see UPDATE below) one major flaw. Google Apps applies a robots.txt file that prohibits all search engines (including Google’s) from indexing the site. This wasn’t always the case, it appears to have first raised its ugly head sometime in November.

Where’s the logic in this ? As it turns out none, it’s a bug, well it may be a bug as a comment I left on Peter Coopers blog prompted him to email a contact he had within Google, who contacted somebody else within Google, who confirmed it was a bug. Makes you worry about handing over too much of your infrastructure to “faceless companies”. Who do you call, or email? Where are the bug databases? Questions on the support forum, remained unanswered. I guess we can always ask guys like Peter Cooper, thanks again Peter.

UPDATE:

The bug may already be fixed, at least for my apps.gleesonIT.com domain. Still seeing the offending robots.txt appearing occasionally on this side of the Atlantic, but accessing the apps sub-domain via an Amazon EC2 image (hosted in Washington State, USA) the robot is now consistently blank.

Now I have to make a decision, will I move the site back onto Google Apps (had moved the “www” domain to Zimki )? Better do something fast before the duplicate content on apps / www.gleesonit.com ends up being penalised!