End of an era

Once upon a time
Almost eight years back, I remember I walked into a cyber cafe for the very first time in my life. The occasion was a practical Internet session as part of a computer basics course that I was taking from NIIT. I still laugh at the fact that I actually took a course in MS Office, c operations and Internet but what do you expect; I knew nothing about computers at that time.

contact_sprabhu
So me & my teacher enter a cyber cafe & I like an obedient student took a seat next to her as she started my first Internet browsing session. Although there was no Google at that time to start off with but my teacher explained Internet very well by showing things like web search, web email. I got to create my very first email address at rediffmail with ID as contact_sprabhu. I dont even know if it exists now but I do remember having been unhappy to have found my name unavailable for an email ID. I knew I was a late entrant.

The First Kiss
After that I regularly used to visit cyber cafe. Having started exploring depths of Internet, one of the things that I DID want to do was to create my own webpage. Sometime before I took this course, I had started browsing computer related stuff on newspapers to identify some good sites. I remember download.com for ex. as one such site. I knew about free web hosting sites such as lycos, tripod and geocities but it wasn't until I got a dial-up connection for myself at my home that I started exploring them. Yahoo mail was the 'in' thing those days with its giant 20MB (wasnt it great!!) of storage. And when geocities merged with Yahoo, the first thing I did was make this. My very first webpage. My heart used to skip a beat as the visitor counter on my site would increment (so what if it was just me checking the same site from different terminals in my college lab). For me, it was a ton of achievement. I never could make it into a full fledged site and that should explain the banner on my welcome page "Please check back soon!".

Enter the Dragon
And on the last day God said "Let there be Google" and there was Google everywhere. Like PVD, it came up with hit after hit, first Google search, then GMail (1GB OOMG), and then Google Pages (GP). Not only did Google give me a short ID but also triggered a series of innovations which appealed to the geeky me. No more YPops for shady POP access, keyboard shortcuts in email, the superb WYSIWYG editor in GP and later Google Apps.
Agreed GP was not the best web editor out there, but you could upload your own files, include numerous widgets and was completely free ! At the same time, I realised I needed a web page to aid in my academic applications. My half-geeky brother who had created his GP website also kicked me into doing this. And thus started the idea of sprabs.com, create a domain for dirt cheap, utilise free webhosting from GP and other free services available online and boom you have got a functional website.

So What If
So what if my website was never checked by any of the places I had applied to, I had a website to build upon. Plus with GP, I did not have to put too much efforts into web designing. I could save that effort for my clients in Texas A&M. Year 2008 saw integration of my website with Google Apps. Now I had a mail, calendar, docs account with sprabs.com. Soon to follow was a flash based cover page to allow users to link to my blog and photography sites. Life seemed to be an easy ride for the web administrator and then it happened.

Dragonslayer
Every dragon has a slayer, GP had GS namely Google Sites. Google was facing lots of problems with GP and it did not fit well in its overall picture of creative collaboration. And Google took a heartless decision in deciding to close GP development and migrate all GP sites by mid 2009 to GS. Good news - certain features in GS are better than in GP and it is more robust, bad news - no user files or custom scripts. Now I have used Google widgets very often but still having no user JS or CSS whatsoever is a big cripple that was absolutely not do-able. And hence I was forced to explore other options. As it turns out, free webhosting does not have an attractive business model and other such sites also either had free ads to support themselves or placed restrictions in terms of what you can (or more often cannot) do. Some were even closing down like GP.

There's a spirit can ne'er die
Being a student at Texas A&M has certain privileges out of which one is you get free webspace. Although it is not a permanent solution, but with good ol' domain forwarding in place and with domain address masking, visitors of my site are now transparently redirected to my TAMU people space. One last thanks to GP as it gave nice zip files of my old sites for migration to new site.

Although it seems like the end of an era for free web hosting, hopefully my site will continue to grow on as it adapts to newer platforms while innovating its original identity. I wish I had some more time to focus on my own website.