Giving Up the Devil You Know

One thing about tools: it's always tempting to remain loyal to the familiar ones. Once I've spent time learning how to use a new tool or technology, I'm inclined to keep using it. I need to be tempted away by the promise of better performance, greater convenience, or very cool features. Otherwise, my uncharacteristically conservative philosophy when it comes to tools can be summarized by this pithy bit of wisdom: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Perhaps this explains why I spent two years wrestling with Google Sites before I discovered Weebly and Blogger, or why I have until recently resisted switching from iPhoto to Picasa for Mac. Sometimes, it's the little things that make all the difference. For example, when I wanted to created tabbed web pages, Google Sites was no help to me. I suppose I could have written the HTML for a tabbed page (see this Elated article), but one of the reasons I was using a WYSIWYG editor like Google Sites in the first place was because I wanted to avoid doing my own programming. Sadly, instead of searching for a new tool, I settled for less and resigned myself to organizing pages with customized sidebars.

During the past two weeks, I have been researching different tools for creating blogs, wikis, and websites. I am delighted to see that Weebly offers a variety of tabbed web page designs. Other niceties, like drag and drop elements and instantaneous previews of template changes, make Weebly an easy tool to learn and use. No doubt, I will eventually encounter drawbacks to Weebly but, so far, I like it just fine.

Content Ownership and Privacy Concerns

I am in the process of creating a digital archive of the written work I created while in the Master of Arts in Professional Writing program. I have decided to use Google Docs to store my collection of work, which primarily includes files in Word (.doc or .docx) and PDF. Based on my experience with Google Docs thus far, the application seems easy to use and well-suited to a Web 2.0 portfolio environment. Best of all, the price is right: free for my current low-volume needs. I also feel encouraged by the Data Liberation Front, which appears to offer an escape hatch from Google if I decide to move my digital archive elsewhere.


However, in spite of all the advantages, I still have some reservations about using Google apps, because the Google Terms of Service include the following statements about "Content license from you" (Section 11):