Thursday, July 13, 2006

Creating a complete personal website with Blog, Guestbook and Gallery in Google page creator (GPC)

Just today I finished my personal website on GPC.
I thought, I should share my experience so that somebody wishing to create their own personal website shouldn't be wondering how to?, again for the same things which i was wondering once.


I always wanted to host my personal site someday and i was looking in to so many free hosting solutions, none of which was satisfactory in some way or the other. AtLast came google with their free hosting service.

Oh I was one of those most happy fellows out there. Free hosting for 100 megs of data that too Ad free. Great!

Oh no... my happiness lasted not so long...GPC only supports client side scripting and not server side. no FTP too. catch.

So I need to look in to how to add my guest book, gallery and blog...

First, I started with blog...searching..searching..gotcha. Blogger supports templates. I can make my site template and replace it instead of the one provided by blogger. Cool.

Done. But, one thing was annoying..the top navigation bar from blogger. Blogger does not provide you the option to remove it if you are using their blogspot hosting. So I have to add the following script to make it go.

#b-navbar {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none
}


I got this script googling. Thank you whomsoever posted that script.

Ok so i got my blog, wat next? Guest book.

Initially i thought of using blogger's own comenting system but some how it was not configurable to achieve a guest book kinda look.
So i was looking for some other commenting system and tried Haloscan and Yaccs.

Haloscan was good but they had their Ads in between.
Finally i settled for Yaccs.
Perfect. No ads and provide user templating system, so that we can add our look and feel. But one catch.

They restrict the no of letters for template code to 3500. Thats kinda trick to get our code to match. But still nice commenting system.

Good. atlast only gallery is left to be done.

It dont need server side scripting to get a photo gallery working. WOW. So i can host my gllery in GPC itself instead of third party.

First i was looking for some ajax gallery and finally settled for this flash one. This one is from XMLPhotoalbum. I tweaked the gallery source code to adapt to my taste.
Used picassa to export the pictures and use it with XMLPhotoalbum.

and there's my complete site with a blog, guest book and a gallery. Looking cool uh?

10 Comments:

Anonymous danny said...

Hello Suresh, I admire your website so much. But I don't understand how you make it?

Thank you!

Sun Jul 16, 09:55:00 PM 2006  
Blogger Mousie said...

I have a blog on blogspot.com and would like to add on the first page, under the archives the list of my favorite blogs...on the left hand side...Could you help me???that would be cool...
here's the address: http://plumpiemousie.blogspot.com
I think I must change something in the template but what???
thank you. mousie

Tue Jul 18, 01:15:00 PM 2006  
Blogger Mousie said...

forgot my address:
claudine.le-gac@laposte.net
see you
mousie

Tue Jul 18, 01:15:00 PM 2006  
Anonymous Hans said...

Your site is cool.
This is what I also need.

Great

Thu Aug 24, 01:05:00 PM 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi,

This is Hans again. I signed up for the free google domain (you refer to) but how to setup the services on http://rozendom.com?

Reading about MX and so on. how to do this?

Tue Aug 29, 11:55:00 AM 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

hey Hans,

This is suresh. Where do you buy your domain name from? the same company should provide you the redirection service.( Mine is from yahoo)?

Tue Sep 05, 06:33:00 PM 2006  
Blogger Jamie Kern said...

I just upgraded to Blogger Beta, and it seems there's a fix to block your script. Now the bar appears just at the end of the page load. Any ideas on how to change/remove it?
Thanks!

Fri Sep 22, 12:57:00 PM 2006  
Blogger Jim Fauni said...

Hi Suresh.

Your site is quite impressive. The design is superb, the organization, excellent. Overall, it's flawless. Thank you very much for this blog even though I don't understand fully how you implemented the parts.

Jim

Fri Nov 24, 03:49:00 PM 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cool!

Sun Dec 17, 10:15:00 PM 2006  
Blogger jeugdhulpverlening said...

γιδω actually is quite impressed. Design, technique - everything is all that ; )

Have not seen a Google site that comes close to yours (except maybe http://jeugdhulpverlening.bureaujim.nl ?;).

Anyways - reason for posting... Wouldn't it be nice if you put a more detailled walk-through online...? I really would like it :)

Thanx!

^|^γιδω^|^

Sat Jun 16, 08:00:00 AM 2007  

Post a Comment

Blog powered by Blogger
© Suresh Narayanan
All rights reserved.