Next on "The Making of Visual Music..."

...a young grad student attempts to make beginning piano accessible as she creates a video-based website for her online class. Drama ensues as she worries about having enough space for her videos, tries not to make her text too garrulous, and wonders what everyone will think of her playing piano in her pajamas.

Well, I was just kidding, there wasn't *that* much drama. Those things were minor concerns, but I think on the whole my project went well. Google Pages is really a simple design tool to use, although it certainly has its own kinks to work out. It's mostly a template site, although it does allow you to edit HTML, which is useful when adding videos, suggestion boxes, and other features. I would've liked there to be more varieties of templates and layouts, but the ones provided were adequate for a free service. The main problem was the completely inadequate Help pages. Google Pages itself provides almost no authoritative answers to your problems and questions; you are instead directed to the Help forums, in which users provide their own answers, which are sometimes less than useful. There is no authoritative section on adding videos, and the user directions provided in the forum were unneccessarily complicated. I finally figured it out on my own, more or less. And it was relatively simple; you just copy the HTML file from your video site (I used Google Video) and paste it onto your page. Google Video was easy to use as well; I found it to have faster uploading times than YouTube, and none of the annoying "related videos" after your movie stops. Another problem I had with Google Pages is that if you mis-name one of your pages, there's no way to change the page name. You just have to delete the whole page and start over. For example, I tried to include hyphens in one of the page names, but it wouldn't accept that and I had to scrap that page (the page name in turn becomes part of the URL).

Other than that the creation was a breeze. It was interesting finding a template for the comments/suggestions box; the first tool I used didn't work, so I used MyContactForm. You can specify the font, size, colors, etc. of the contact form box, although it does force you to include a link to the site, which is fair enough. I found out that the 100 MB of space provided for media is practically limitless, at least for my needs; some kind of tool for telling you how much space you have left would be useful (there might be one that I missed). The shooting of the videos was no problem...my boyfriend helped me film them, and luckily they required no editing, although I do have the tools to do so. And really, there's no story behind my wearing pajamas. On days when I don't have to work or go anywhere, I'm loath to leave the warmth and safety of my pajamas at all.

Here's the link to my site: Whitney's Wonderful World of Visual Music