The Return of Google Apps Free Accounts

 Google did finally walk back the end of the grandfathered free GA accounts and thenibble.org is now "Free Legacy Edition of G Suite for personal use". Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The End of Google Apps Free Accounts

The Nibble Google Apps account will be shutting down as Google has posted that they are ending the G Suite legacy free edition (formerly Google Apps free tier) and anyone left on that free ride has to pay or get the hell out. Specifically:

"The G Suite legacy free edition will no longer be available starting May 1, 2022. Starting May 1, Google will seamlessly transition you to Google Workspace, which you can use at no cost until July 1, 2022."

Going back through the posts, the nibble moved to Google Apps back in December, 2009. It's been a great service as a freebie mainly because it has run for so long with pretty minimal issues (i.e. features going away or breaking).

Get a Takeout backup of all your stuff ASAP and start transitioning off of Google Services that are in the GA account.

The @thenibble.org email we can set in Google Domains to Forward your emails. Currently working on a more specific instruction to migrate - but at a high level

1. Start forwarding your email in your account
2. Setup your @thenibble.org as an alias in your @gmail account 
3. Import mail from your Google Apps / Workspace (+ "profit" ?)

Don't forget your Contacts!

Files in Google Drive should be readily movable. 

Browser history, bookmarks, passwords, all that stuff is all readily movable.

Blogger (this site included) is quick to update account access

1. Invite your @gmail.com (or other acct) as an author
2. Accept the invite
3. Promote the account from Author to Admin

Google Sites *poof* gone. Copy content over to Blogger.com pages / posts. Edit - not quite gone, sites still a thing but content isn't so easy to move, so simple sites should be re-created.

Any Online sites and services you use tied to your Google Apps account you'll have to change over to something else. Mostly I went with stand-alone accounts like a separate login for each since it's all in the password manager anyhow the integration wasn't doing anything other than hoovering my Google account info into third-party services. 

-> Notably thenibble.org domain registration in Google Domains both the admins were Google Apps accounts. Almost missed that and that would have really been a major #fail

Ciao

Dom617b

Moving DNS registration

We're transferring DNS registration to Google Domains; mostly it's just cheaper. Integration with GA is a nice plus.

That is all

Google Drive

Anyone tried Google Drive already?  5GB free space, in Google Apps seems to be just tied in with Docs.  We're getting this message at the moment from drive.google.com

Google Drive is not yet enabled
for the The Nibble domain

But sounds like this is a known issue and Google Drive should become available shortly.

Google+ and Google Voice for The Nibble

Great news, Bits! Two new services have been enabled in our Google Apps domain: Google+ and Google Voice.

Google+ is the much anticipated Facebook killer long delayed but now release. Check the docs. You can now use your GA account as a Google+ contact so if you’ve been holding out for that switch-over, that wait is over!

Google Voice lets you use Google as a VoIP -> POTS gateway. So now with your GA account you can sign up a phone number and make calls under your account.

GA, now with more sodium!

Moving Blogs to Blogger

After much foot dragging and fiddling around, I have finally started moving blogs off of Wordpress on Alia and over to Blogger.

I have started by moving my own blog using Wordpress2Blogger. This pulled the whole message archive, the comments, tags, and pages over including preserving published vs. draft states. This makes the third full migration and fourth platform for my blog so this content has come from fingering (.plan), to a custom PHP blog I wrote the software for myself, to Wordpress, and now to Blogger. And other than some of the initial .plan posts which were never archived, I've managed to keep the entire archive from 2003.

The biggest amount of effort in moving from WP to Blogger is setting up the site layout. Keeping lists of links and pages is pretty much manual but as Blogger has widgets for these, its not particularly onerous. And switching DNS. From what I can tell, the links are all being preserved at least on my own blog so it should be just a matter of waiting.

Once my blog is moved over, I'll move the main Nibble blog and if that works fine, I'll encourage the couple other bits here to move their blogs as well which will get me closer to offloading the last of the applications running on Alia.

Ciao

Email Themes

You can now set your own theme for your webmail -you can upload a background image and possibly more!

http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2011/04/customize-your-own-inbox-background.html