Redirector

So the move to Googles cloud continues.

There's been lots of disruptions, but its well on the way now.

The big watershed has been getting my Storybridge Redirector app working on Google's AppEngine.

It redirects any URL I want to URL's in the new Google sites/blogger structure.

For example folks who used to go to my blog from http://storybridge.org/wordpress can now do that again. Since AppEngine logs any URLs sent to it I can see which ones are not matching and add redirects for them too.

Its not exactly rocket science but its good enough that it might be handy for other folks doing what I am - namely trying to bring over 10 years of internet history (in the form of in-bound links from other sites) over to a new structure.

I have put the code up on Googles code hosting site, and logged a few bugs that I am aware of.

Material on the new sites already include:

• my London Journal
• political-philosophical essays in the Phylactery
• tech articles in my new "compute" site
• and of course Storybridge games
  

Generally I'm pretty happy with the Google Apps for Domains experience. The sites themselves seem like a good product. My main goal was to get something low maintenance and low cost - so scoring a lovely round figure of zero on both those counts has to be a big plus.

But the loss of flexibility is tangible. Hopefully with more uptake Google will add extra features to the Sites product. In particular I miss the ability to add the widgets, url lists, and so on in the margins like you can with Blogger. Sites has very little flexibility in this regard. Maybe I have just not found it yet.

I would love to get some feedback on anything y'all feel like mentioning - speed of loading, look-n-feel, ease of commenting - would like to know how it looks from "the other side of the glass" so to speak.