Saturday, September 04, 2021

Not Found On Google

You may be having trouble looking at my want list site.  The link over there to the right is probably not giving you my pages.  (Bleep bloop it in the comments as to what you're seeing, I'm curious.)

Google has shut down their "old" style websites in favor of a new version that seems to be limited to six themes or templates, all of which are excessively generic and not geared to the kind of pages that work well for plain text lists.  


I tried to convert my site into the new format, but found it incredibly labor intensive, since the conversion ruins all the formatting (which I am very OCD about), distorts all the fonts and combines certain text with adjacent paragraphs that must be manually separated.  After trying to make my Home page into something feasible, I got too frustrated and gave up.  

It is now impossible to embed pictures into your text.  On these pages, images are either the full width of the text page, or in their own isolated column, which pushes the text into a narrower field.  The football image above was meant to be that way, but the smaller one belongs much farther down the page.  Another image did stick about halfway down from there, so I have no idea.


This screenshot also shows the editing view and three images that were previously embedded and now wander aimlessly at the beginning of the section.  Conversion divides the text into sections when the spacing changes.  This would be useful if you did one for each set, but that would probably prove way too time consuming and cumbersome.

I had experimented with putting my lists on additional pages here on the blog, and so I spent several hours updating and pasting in the rest of my Baseball page last night.  You may have already seen the Baseball Wants tab above this blog page.  Unfortunately, even though the editing is similar to the old Google site, the page width is smaller and not indicated very well on the editor, so I kept having to go back and tweak a lot of listings for spacing and wrapping.  And then I had to go through and manually color each set heading and the text so it is easier to read against the black background.  In places where I used small type for descriptive details, etc., it shows here as another couple sizes smaller.  I changed a lot of it to regular size, but didn't get it all, so I'll just leave it for now. 


It'll do.  Once I get the other pages up, the level of work will decrease dramatically.  I don't think adding and subtracting things should be too bad.  Though I kept feeling like each time I saved and previewed the page, things would change.  I suppose I shouldn't be so OCD about how it all looks, but I like to keep it neat and readable.

So for now, this is what I'm going with.  I also put some baseball sets into my Collection on the Trading Card Database.  Now that you can add a whole set at once, and then go in and click out what you're missing right into your want list, it's not such a tedious process.  But if I'm at a show or shop, I want to see all my want lists at once so I can scroll up and down, and the Database can't do that (at least not that I've seen).

If you guys know of another simple free website service that works well, let me know below.  I saved all my pages before they got locked down, so I have all my data.

And thanks a lot, Google....



4 comments:

  1. Same thing happened to me. I switched it over to the new Sites, which was good enough for me so my lists are very bare bones. One of my lists had anchors so you could click on a hyperlink and go further down the page; that doesn't work anymore.

    Clicked on yours and I get the August 30th edit.

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  2. I got the August 30 version too.

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  3. I really like how easy Weebly is to use.

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  4. looks like you're making good progress.

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