Thursday, July 25, 2013

Geocities 2.0?

After killing off Reader, I think that Google Sites is going to be the next to get the axe. I just recieved an email that pointed me to this Sunsetting Adsense help page. Rather than sunsetting Adsense, I get the feeling Google is getting itchy to get rid of Sites completely. It probably doesn't fit in with Google+ or something.

Back in 2009 or so, when Geocities closed down, I asked a question on superuser.com about alternatives for easy-to-host websites. The top answer, by the internet's Jon Skeet no less, was "Use Google Sites! It'll never shut down!". You can thank the hive mind on Stackipedia for deleting the question, and now Google Sites has its head firmly in the noose.

On the side bar to the right you might see that I host my old GBA remakes and the Chaos stuff on Google Sites. Now might be a good time for me to look for a new home for 'em.

Ah! While I'm ranting: in other related news about removing information from the web, Yahoo Groups have removed their RSS feeds. I kept track of the Gooey Blob group via the RSS feed. I realized it had gone way because the pretty good Tiny Tiny RSS warns you about dead feeds, unlike Google Reader which swallowed all the RSS errors.

Update 2013-08-17: now Google Code has removed the generic RSS feed too :-( Pages like https://code.google.com/feeds/p/android-ndk-profiler/updates/basic used to show all updates for that project. No more. For now you can still subscribe via RSS to individual Issues, Wiki and Download updates using https://code.google.com/feeds/p/android-ndk-profiler/downloads/basic for downloads,  https://code.google.com/feeds/p/android-ndk-profiler/svnchanges/basic?path=/wiki/ for the Wiki changes and https://code.google.com/feeds/p/android-ndk-profiler/issueupdates/basic for issues. It's only a matter of time until these are removed...