LOOKIT IS TEH BROWNPAU GOOGLE PAGE! So Google Pages gives you 100MB of free HTML and image hosting, a WYSIWYG editor with limited HTML coding capability and themability, and a googlepages.com subdomain. The markup produced isn’t so great, though: lots of crufty tag soup with deprecated elements and invalid code. For me, it’s just part of the kitschy amateur charm, but Drew McClellan has problems with that.

I found bigger problems, though, when I looked at the page edit URL — /edit/brownpau/home — and thought to myself, wow, wouldn’t it be funny if I entered someone else’s username in there and got his edit page? So I tried it with Mathowie’s edit URL, and got, whoa, his edit page — and I was able to edit it.

I filed a bug report — and belatedly told an alarmed Mathowie of the hax0rage — and later got an email, and then a call from Justin Rosenstein, Google Pages project manager. Apparently there was a huge number of factors working in the background which happened to synchronize — Justin described it as “a dozen stars aligning just so” — that somehow gave me admin-level access to edit and publish several other users’ Google Pages. The bug was fixed, and he thanked me for being nice enough to report the bug and not go on a wild vandalism spree.

I told him a lesser mortal would have given in to the temptation to “goatse all over the place,” to which he responded, “Goat what?” He should totally Google it. (Note: Don’t Google it. If you don’t know Goatse, don’t ask. You really don’t want to know.)

Anyway, there’s my Google-related 15 minutes for today. Justin said they’d mail me a goodie bag or something for being so nice. That’ll be something to look forward to. In the meantime, enjoy my new home page on the internet web!

Also see other people’s Googlepages as they make them.

Update: The Google Goodie Bag is here!