I wrote about Weebly before but I wanted to give an update of a Weebly site I enabled for a friend that’s now out there for all to see.

Tom and his family are selling their house in Havana, FL and he really wanted a simple site to showcase the home. Enter Weebly. I created the account for Tom, selected the design, arranged the pages, uploaded some content and pics, and, voila, a simple site. Then we took advantage of Weebly’s domain registration and registered homeonapond.com to point to the new site. After some content tweaks here and there, we’re both quite happy with the site.

So if you have a friend or family member looking for a really, really easy hosted web site creation tool, I cannot recommend Weebly enough. And if you’re looking for a house in Havana, FL…well, you know where to find one.

Okay, so I’m a couple of days late in posting this but I wanted to wish Mollie a happy anniversary. It’s been 10 amazing years. I can’t wait for the next 10.

Does anyone have any experience with an Au Pair?

Just curious.

Just came across weebly.com, a free, hosted CMS/blogging engine with a slick AJAX editor. It’s a perfect quick site generator for those who may have family or friends that want something a little more sophisticated than Google Pages (and others of that ilk) and a lot less retarded than MySpace and FaceBook. You can even throw your own domain on it via their registrar for a measly $25 and not have to worry about setting A Names via GoDaddy, etc.

Another couple of nice features Weebly offers:

• Video integration via YouTube and Google Video
• Flickr slideshow integration
• Google Maps
• Dozens of clean designs
• Support for custom HTML (ahem, WP.com - are you paying attention?)
• Contact form submission to email
• Ads for those that want them
• Feed reader
• RSS creation

All of this under an easy to use interface that even Gramps could figure out. It’s probably not the most powerful CMS/blogging engine out there but it is certainly one of the easiest. A friend of mine needs a quick site to showcase his house for sale. I was able to throw up 90% of the work and register a domain in less than an afternoon. Too cool. When his site is finished (he still has to get me content and photos) I’ll post a link update on this post.

Only one real geeky downside: the XHTML generated fails the W3C check. Oh well.

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Google has released their App Engine. Winer’s really excited. McConnell thinks it will scare competitors like Amazon S3 into reconsidering their models, especially for the independent developers market. With access to the Google cloud, this will be a very good thing. In fact, it could have come in handy this week as I’ve been banging my head looking for a file sharing/collab suite ala box.net but with some usability tweaks. I’ll probably end up licensing webasyst.net’s “Files” SaaS to fit most of my client’s needs with some minor PHP scripting to fill the gaps. No API?! Argh, come on fellas!

Alas, I know no python.

Also check out…

• django - Python Web Framework included in the App engine
• webapp - simple WSGI-compatible web application framework
• Google App Engine Gallery

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