There’s no free lunch. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Always back up your work.
I should have learned those lessons years ago.
But when PageFlakes died and came back and died again over the past couple of weeks, I was devastated. Right now, the site seems most sincerely dead.
I loved Pageflakes as a platform for my most newsy pathfinders. I loved the bookmark widgets, the anything Flake, the handy RSS feeds, the pretty themes, the customization features. My students relied on our many Flakes for current events guidance across the subject areas. My teachers use them as a start page for their classes.
Now, instead of this French pathfinder,
We get this:
SERVICE UNAVAILABLE
PageFlakes offered no warning. I suppose it owed me no warning. Happily (?) I was able to find some support among my fellow PageFlake using Tweeters and a few bloggers.
I learned my lesson. I grieved.
And now I am ready to move on.
During the brief PageFlakes’ brief resurrection, I printed all my pages so I could resurrect them on another platform. My two candidates are the free NetVibes platform and the subscription service and community, LibGuides. Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll report back on my big migration decision.
Suggestions, as always, are welcome!
About Joyce Valenza
I would recommend against a switch to Netvibes. I moved my site from our district server to a Netvibes site two years ago and am getting ready to move it back. I’ve found the site to be very slow; students sit and grumble at a white screen waiting for the database widgets to load. (Of course the one database they want is always the last to load, and middle schoolers are not known for their patience.) I suspect I’m partly to blame because of the sheer number of widgets and feeds I’ve put on the site, but it just doesn’t have the feel of a stable and robust provider.
Hi Joyce. We switched to Libguides a couple of years ago. I also started Libguides at my new school this year. We really like it for so many reasons including the ability to copy one widget from one guide to another and share information with other libraries. Plus, the students love it! I also see that other librarians are creating guides in Google Sites too. With so many tools out there, it is tough to decide.
Good luck!