New home page

I’ve been thinking about making my personal website more mobile phone friendly for a while now. After all, more and more people browse the web on their phones. But I have been writing the HTML for my personal home page by hand, and the coding to get something that works for either a desktop or a mobile phone was beyond my skill.

Then I got an email reminder that I had once tinkered with Google Sites. Google is revamping the service, and sent me an email saying, “Hey, you better migrate your page over to the new service.”

I hadn’t touched it in years and had never really gotten anywhere with it. But it did get me to look at the new service and try it.

I’m pretty impressed. 

I had tinkered with automatic website builders before, especially Wix. I got some nice results with Wix, but the interface was so fiddly it drove me crazy. Google Sites was much more straightforward. 

But the big selling point was that the site finally looked good on a mobile phone!

There are many things that bug me about the Google Sites interface. You can’t even look at the underlying HTML, never mind fiddle with it. (You can still look at and edit your HTML in Blogger, which also recently got an overhaul.) You can used the “Embed” button to put in some custom HTML code, but the embedded section is “walled off” from the rest of the page. I’ve figured out how to add script to add Altmetric badges, but they don’t appear the way I want yet. 

It is, of course, very easy to add anything that Google owns and hard to add anything from anywhere else. Putting in a YouTube video has its own dedicated button and plays nice with the layout, but a Vimeo video is a very different, trickier job.

There are currently some deep limits on how much you can adjust the look of the site. You have a very limited set of typefaces, in particular. I am hoping that as this service matures that the options will expand.

I will keep updating my existing, made by hand with love website for the time being, but I decided for now to have my easy-to-remember URL, DoctorZen.net, point to the new site. It’s definitely a work in progress at the moment, and I will be getting

As far as I know, all you need for this service is a plain old Gmail / Google account.