Google Apps

Well, I have finally moved my world to google; email, website, documents, (new) YouTube account, RSS feed and a few more. It's taken quite a few weeks to sort it out but it has been worth it.

I bought my own domain name (tomwhiteley.com) but never really used it, then a few weeks ago a guy at work was telling me about how he'd set it up so I had to give it a go!

I've been using GoogleMail for a while but not as my main account, the main reason was that I had a massive and stupidly long email address because all the other Tom Whiteley's had beaten me to the good ones, so I never really got into it...  I've now pointed my MX record to Google so all of my mails are now being sent there and are loads more managable, also I got the email address I had paid for all of those years ago!

For quite a while I have had a website but it's never been very good, version 1.0 started off being a home-coded HTML only monster with no style sheets and nothing good about it. Again it was a hige draw back to the domain name I'd purchased. I also hosted it from my own server (being too tight to pay for hosting) so it was pretty slow when I was trying to remote to it... Now I've setup GoogleSites, which hosts a half decent site about me and the links to my other profiles around the web. It was really easy to setup and I can have as many sub-sites as I want!

I've moved some of my documents to my GoogleDrive, still not moving fully towards it yet but their spreadsheet and other office-like tools are quite powerful and feature rich.

I was mostly annoyed about my YouTube account; as anyone with an account knows it's tied to your google account but sadly I couldn't move all of my playlists, "likes" and subscriptions to my new GoogleApps account for whatever reason. So I had to make all of these manually again (well, apart from the "likes" because there were several hundred of them).

Moving over this Blogger account and reimporting my RSS feeds to GoogleReader were the easiest to sort out.

I still want to mess around with Contacts, Images (picasa) and the calendar but there is plenty of time for that and at the moment, not many reasons to.

I am now feeling a bit easier about moving away from Hotmail which has been quite akward to setup on some devices and not very flexible with the social features of the past. I am still not quite there yet, I need to inform people that I've moved my email address but I will, eventually :-)