13 ms·

My blog is now generated by Google Docs

398 points by RupertWiser 6y ago

el_programmador 6y ago
God forbid if Google lifted their hands some day, can you even imagine how many million people will be impacted due to how many services ranging from emails to map apps to cloud services to web services, etc? Is it wise to give one entity power over so many things or its better to encourage a decentralized structure where multiple organizations control only bits of the pie?
- duxup 6y ago
  At least with takeout I know I have regular backups. That's more than most places offer.
  - tmpz22 6y ago
    Have you looked through the takeout outputs though? They are completely worthless to most users. It's funny to me that a bunch of Google devs built the functionality and thought "ya this will do".
    - thinkingkong 6y ago
      I doubt the devs have much influence over the scope of the data output. The goal there is minimum for legal, compliance, or pr reasons.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      https://mboxfile.com/google-takeout/ https://mboxfile.com/google-takeout/
    - adrianmsmith 6y ago
      What's wrong with the data? I mainly care about Google Docs and Sheets, they're exported as Word and Excel (and there are other options if you don't like this formats), and the random sample of docs I tried in the output worked fine in Word and Excel.
    - filleduchaos 6y ago
      How are the takeout outputs useless? Mail for example comes as a nice standard mbox
  - lonelappde 6y ago
    Takeout doesn't work for users with substantial data.
    - duxup 6y ago
      What does it do? Does it not provide the data?
      - hobo_mark 6y ago
        From when I last tried (and retried several times), it fails to export everything so you only get a partial snapshot with random pieces missing.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Takeout is useless without Google. Also: gsuite doesn't really have a backup feature. You're locked in for all that it's worth.
    - duxup 6y ago
      Why is it useless?
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        Try restoring it. A backup is only good if you can make it work again, and an export function is only good if there is something else that you can import it back into.
        duxup 6y ago
        I guess I'm missing how that relates to the comparison I made. Google at least lets me back things up. Most services do not allow it at all. So there's no restoring anywhere else at all, no chance. Having the data I could at least have a chance that some service might offer a rebuilt import option to pick up those google users ... or I could build it myself / at least have the information. To me that's still leaps and bounds better than any other options that I know of.
        notechback 6y ago
        The GDPR obliges all companies to provide an option for users to receive all data held on them; takeout and FB'd equivalent were implemented in response to that. For all other companies, at least if you are in the EU, you should he able to request the data by eg email and they are obliged to send it. You just don't know what format you'll get.
        duxup 6y ago
        I believe takeout predates the GDPR ... by a wide margin. As for all other companies they might be obliged to send it, but I don't see many ways to do so. That still make's google's method way better IMO.
- austin223 6y ago
  Absolutely agree. Unfortunately I don’t think nations like the US will ever have the balls to break up their wonder children.
  - el_programmador 6y ago
    Nations are ultimately made up of people and they are subject to peoples' pressure. Its the people who we must convince and wake them from their deep slumber.
  - hencq 6y ago
    You mean like the US did with AT&T? I'm not sure if they 'have the balls' currently, but they have in the past and it's not inconceivable they would do so again. Microsoft came close to it as well.
    - zokier 6y ago
      I do point out that US vs AT&T did first major anti-trust settlement in 1913, and the breakup ultimately happened in 1984, or about 70 years later. So maybe we'll see Google breakup too in 2084 or around that time..
    - lonelappde 6y ago
      AT&T reformed as regional monopolies in far less time than it took the government to break up the national monopoly.
- zokier 6y ago
  Sure, it is a genuine concern. But I find the context for the comment here bit funny considering how much the world runs on top of gdocs etc, the risk of losing the source of personal blog is drop in a ocean. And while there of course are no guarantees, I at least would expect fair warning before stuff like docs is killed.
  - lonelappde 6y ago
    The ocean is made of drops.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Well, I don't need to trust Google's employees, I trust its shareholders wanting to make money, which will never stop. Since Google's popular products all contribute to making money in the end, they're not going to stop. Shareholders just wouldn't let it happen. There's a chain of accountability here that goes employees > C suite > board > shareholders. So I don't quite see what situation you're worried about here.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    if by some magical event Alphabet/Google is able to shut down their free versions of their Office apps and rely solely on G Suite/YouTube/Waymo/etc without losing money, I don't doubt they would do it. If that event will ever happen is still a mystery and is probably unlikely to happen within my/our lifetimes.
  - lonelappde 6y ago
    Google's shareholders don't hold substantial voting power. Accountability practically ends at CEO.
    - crazygringo 6y ago
      That's just so factually untrue it's hard to know what to tell you. Do you understand how corporate boards work? How large shareholders get their own board seats? How boards hire and fire members of the management team? The idea of a toothless board is a complete fiction. I don't know where you got the idea, but it couldn't be more wrong. (Perhaps you're confusing it with boards where a single shareholder has more than 50% of shares, thus making the board largely irrelevant because the shareholder controls it. But even in that case, the CEO effectively reports to that shareholder, and there have been many, many, many cases of underperforming CEO's being fired. It happens all the time.)
      - johannes1234321 6y ago
        Point here is that in Alphabet the voting power is for the largest part within the founders. Other shareholders can't do much against them.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  I don't think the cost of losing things is as high as you imagine. You can use X until it fails and then you can use Y. I also don't think your doomsday scenario makes much sense either. What do you mean "lifted their hands" and why would it happen out of the blue with zero warning? Though I'll repeat: so what? I don't think a decentralized system is much better in this regard. It just means things rot at a more staggered pace. Service A shuts down on year 0, service B shuts down on year 10, etc. It's just a different trade-off, not the panacea we like to pretend it is.
krm01 6y ago
After building a number of [1] projects that are powered by Google Docs, I recently realised that it also means that countries (like China) where Google is blocked, won't be able to access your content. https://upstart.me https://upstart.me (powered by Google Docs)
- sfusato 6y ago
 FAQ not expanding. Console errors: Blocked loading mixed active content “http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js” http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.mi... upstart.me Request to access cookie or storage on “<URL>” was blocked because it came from a tracker and content blocking is enabled. 6 ReferenceError: $ is not defined script.js:1:1 Blocked loading mixed active content “http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js” http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.mi... upstart.me Loading failed for the <script> with source “http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js” http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.mi.... upstart.me:179:1 ReferenceError: $ is not defined
 - judge2020 6y ago
 Have you visited the Cloudflare main website by chance? cdnjs doesn't serve cookies unless you've visited cloudflare.com yourself. Either way the cdnjs jquery isn't a tracker.
 - shanipribadi 6y ago
 mixed active content was why the browser blocked it. the cdnjs link is http, while the site is https.
 - scott113341 6y ago
 Looks interesting, I signed up! FWIW, I ran into the same issue (Chrome): https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1910118/81509549-a0f8dd00-92c8-11ea-941e-8d18d66b3127.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1910118/81509549-a...
lkc9 6y ago
This isn't directly related to the post but the root of this website is hilarious: https://benwiser.com/ https://benwiser.com/
- superhuzza 6y ago
  Came here to say the same thing. It's weird, I loved the effect. I showed it to my partner and she found it terrifying though!
- miguelmota 6y ago
  On mobile I just see a broken static image of the person's head.
  - devbat8712 6y ago
    Tilt your phone.
- modeless 6y ago
  I love it! I think the rendering could be improved by projecting the image to compensate for screen tilt, in addition to rotating the head.
_Chief 6y ago
seeing secrets.txt in the repo gave me a fright for a second and it's not even my project
mikeryan 6y ago
It’s a bit strange hitting the google redirect notice when linking from the site. You also might want to put your .idea directory and secrets in a .gitignore
- netsharc 6y ago
  If I were to fork his code I'd fix that the first thing, I'd hate to annoy my users like that. Reminds me of this jwz post (you have to copy and paste manually since he doesn't like HN as a referrer: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/02/looking-forward-into-the-past/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/02/looking-forward-into-the-pa... ).
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - gibolt 6y ago
    This feels like such a weirdly specific block... You have a blog that you want people to read, but not people who come from a specific source
    - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      This is why browsers are working to remove user-agent and referer. Almost all real world use is tracking and nonsensical blocks.
      - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        I was familiar with removing user-agent work, but what's this about removing referrer? Can you give a link?
        Polylactic_acid 6y ago
        Firefox removed the path in 2018 while in private browsing, now their tracking protection is in normal mode too so I imagine it will happen there as well. I'm guessing the only thing stopping them from removing it totally is some sites break if they cant see the domain you came from. https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-data-leaks-by-stripping-path-information-in-http-referrers/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-data...
elondaits 6y ago
I recently used Google Sheets as a CMS for a couple of projects. In my case I had a server-side script which read the sheets, converted the data to JSON and saved it on a file which was then fetched by the JS client. The conversion only had to run when there were updates (e.g once a day). It was really convenient in my particular case because all users where familiar with Google Sheets, already had users and passwords, and I had good granular control over permissions.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  You might also be interested in Glide, helps build mobile-apps with Google Sheets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163081
- mettamage 6y ago
  How does it work when you have a lot of text and you need to put that in one cell? Doesn't that get a bit too unruly?
  - vijaybritto 6y ago
    I dont think we need to care about google sheet's looks while using it as a DB. This approach is pretty good and fast
    - mettamage 6y ago
      Ah, fair enough. I totally forgot that reason, haha.
- czzarr 6y ago
  If you have more needs like this, you could try out Awesome Table. https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/56088344336 https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/5608... (I'm the product manager)
butz 6y ago
What about just using Google Sites? They have updated UI and improved functionality quite a bit. You can even link your own domain.
- stOneskull 6y ago
  Google put an annoying link on there called "Report this site". Maybe there's a way to take that off now but that really sucked. What happens if some idiots report your site for no reason?
factorialboy 6y ago
The URL to your GitLab project goes via a Google redirect. I'm guessing this in an unintentional side-effect of using Google Docs as CMS?
ForrestN 6y ago
This is a nice idea, especially for a case where a website is collaboratively edited. I don't love Google Docs for solo projects, and I don't enjoy using it, but its collaborative editing features are so good and reliable that I can't escape it. Being able to suggest and accept changes with commenting among a group of people would be really nice for a website for a collective, say. That said, a bit of small, hopefully constructive feedback. The impact of this would be a bit bigger if there were more blog posts, so that by the time you reveal you're using google docs it feels more like a practical application and less like a very quick demo. Also, while I understand that there's a sort of "coder who doesn't do design" aesthetic, it might be good to at least change the colors a bit so that there's a bit more magic of transformation. This looks a bit too much like, well, a Google doc, and you want to establish that something cool is going on that couldn't be done with just an index of publicly visible google docs.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- remote 6y ago
  It's a really cool idea Google codelabs has been using for a few years to provide a unified way to write development tutorials[1]. 1. https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools/ https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools/
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    Not to be confused with Google Colab! Which provides shared Jupyter Notebook, which also can be great for writing markdown cells, with graphs and code interspersed.
- leesalminen 6y ago
  We’ve been using a shared Google Docs folder to manage our app’s release notes. We parse the folder in reverse chronological order, paginate 5 at a time and use their doc to HTML converter API. We then cache in Redis for performance. Works great and keeps the development team away from having to update it. Product/support can edit to their content!
z3t4 6y ago
Would be interesting with more details on how this works. Like how the URL works and how the pages are styled. Is there any services needed beside google docs, etc.
ignoramous 6y ago
My first encounter with a docs -> website was the now-defunct joelewis' hexopress.com. The code; however, is opensource [0]. There's a dated, unmaintained Google Docs to Markdown converter [1] which can be used as a source for a static site generator like Hugo [2]. This is particular interesting since folks can style content as they normally would from within Google Docs and have it show up with the same styling on a webpage, rather than write HTML themselves. [0] https://github.com/joelewis/hexopress https://github.com/joelewis/hexopress [1] https://github.com/mangini/gdocs2md https://github.com/mangini/gdocs2md [2] https://gohugo.io/content-management/formats/ https://gohugo.io/content-management/formats/
- leonidasv 6y ago
  As an alternative, Gatsby — a JS-powered static site generator — has a plugin for Google Docs that appears to be in active development. https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-google-docs/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-google-docs/
WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
Hey all, keep in mind that this is an experiment and the OP is therefore looking for input from users. Don't look at it from a finished product point of view but as a starting point and give your ideas. I think this is a great solution a quick in office CMS for in house projects.
londons_explore 6y ago
It would be cool if it was 100% live... Ie. with every keystroke the website is updated. Does the Google Docs API have some kind of event based notification of new keystrokes you could hook into?
- schaefer 6y ago
  As a reader, i don't want to be anywhere near somebody's half-finished first draft. different personalities, I suppose.
lihaciudaniel 6y ago
>wordpress (I really don’t like wordpress). I really don't like your blog
city41 6y ago
This website: https://www.fgbg.art/ https://www.fgbg.art/, is powered by this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W8RE885PVF2z3L9KU9LSCS3y5mpAMldAuoEfcuCcLms https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W8RE885PVF2z3L9KU9LS... The spreadsheet not being normalized is a bit annoying, but I could fix that if I really wanted to. All in all, I actually find using Google as a data source like this works pretty well.
- onesmalluser 6y ago
  What add-on are you using to do that? I've been playing around using Lovely Table and Awesome Table for this purpose but not really sure which one I ultimately want.
  - city41 6y ago
    The site is built with Gatsby using gatsby-source-google-sheets. The source is here: https://github.com/city41/fgbg https://github.com/city41/fgbg (warning, it's pretty terrible. I built this thing very rapidly as at its heart it's really just an experiment). https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-google-sheets/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-google-sheet...
  - czzarr 6y ago
    Awesome Table product manager here, let me know if I can help.
- jonnydubowsky 6y ago
  I just spent 20 minutes browsing your site, revisiting these epic scenes. Thanks for sharing!
madsohm 6y ago
I run my wishlist from a Google Sheets document. It's a bit annoying that you can't have gaps in rows in the spreadsheet, since fetching as JSON will only return up until the first gap.
throwawaysea 6y ago
Cool idea, but I worry about over reliance on Google or other big tech players, especially after their recent steps to ramp up censorship. Another example is that Medium blocked many informative COVID-19 posts recently despite them being thoughtful and necessary discussions, especially given the repeated failings of the WHO. What’s a great blog platform that features a lack of censorship or protection against censorship as a feature?
xnxn 6y ago
I recently learned (via Rich Harris's recent Svelte Society Day talk[1]) that the New York Times does something like this using a custom markup language called ArchieML[2]. [1]: https://youtu.be/luM5uobewhA?t=1301 https://youtu.be/luM5uobewhA?t=1301 [2]: http://archieml.org/ http://archieml.org/
soared 6y ago
Blot.im does this but with dropbox and its amazing. Since you use word docs instead of g docs the formatting transfers over perfectly. Super easy setup and $20/yr. I’ve been using it for 2 or 3 years and it’s great. Npzero.com is my blog if you want to see an example. There are much prettier themes you can choose from as well. I have a chrome book so sometimes I write in g docs, export to word, and upload to Dropbox’s webapp and make final adjustments in their online editor. No affiliation, just a great product.
- nngrey 6y ago
  I use Blot as well and have been very pleased with it.
obeattie 6y ago
I’ve been thinking about going the other way a bit recently: having bots consume input from and add their output to a Google Doc. There are so many processes in most businesses which involve many humans collaborating on templatised documents. Google Docs/Sheets fits into these workflows very well, but there’s often scope for some partial automation in there too - pulling information from databases and outside sources and keeping it in sync, etc. Developing custom web apps for each case is too much effort for too little reward, takes users out of a familiar (and well-liked) interface which updates in real-time, makes you reimplement permission models, etc. Not something I’ve explored properly yet so I don’t know if the APIs are rich enough to make this easy, but I would really like to give it a look.
- pier25 6y ago
  I used that approach for a reporting system and it worked pretty well. It was easy to hit the sheets api rate limit but it was just a matter of waiting a bit between requests. The node script was triggered hourly with Heroku scheduler.
marvinblum 6y ago
You can do this with Emvi [1] too. It works like a headless CMS. I wrote a wiki for a German gaming community [2]. The project is available on GitHub [3] if anyone is interested and can easily be adopted to your own project. The articles fit a blog very well as they don't use pages and therefor are continuous. The API spits out clean HTML. [1] https://emvi.com/ https://emvi.com/ [2] https://wiki.sts.wtf/ https://wiki.sts.wtf/ [3] https://github.com/Special-Tactical-Service/wiki https://github.com/Special-Tactical-Service/wiki
magicalhippo 6y ago
Way back I considered using Microsoft Word as my content editor for my blog, and wrote a PHP script that converted .docx files to static HTML. To publish all I had to do was upload a new .docx file to a given directory on my shared host and wait for the script to run. It converted the Word "Heading 1" etc styles to some CSS class, and had support for extracting inline images etc. I relied on convention for certain things like post title, and it didn't support too fancy things in the Word document. At that time .docx was rather new, so I wasn't sure if it would stick around. Also I wasn't sure this was the best idea ever, so I ended up with something else. But it was a fun adventure.
- Hello71 6y ago
  is there any benefit of that over the built-in html export function (which also works terribly)?
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    Well the key point was to use Word for basic content editing and layout, but have control over the styling on the website part of things (ie via my own style sheet). As I recall the generated HTML from Word was quite a mess, and it would be non-trivial to change the styling of it. It also allowed the pages to be easily integrated into my blog, with first paragraph being visible on the main page etc. Mostly though it was just a "can it be done" experiment :)
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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richardARPANET 6y ago
Shameless plug incoming... I made the equivalent but for APIs using Google Sheets :) https://sheet2api.com/ https://sheet2api.com/
- metrix 6y ago
  i'm using Google Sheets for a Coronavirus Tracker http://amarillo.land/coronavirus.html http://amarillo.land/coronavirus.html but i'm not enthused with the performance. This looks very interesting!
  - czzarr 6y ago
    Depending on what you're trying to achieve, you could try Awesome Table (I'm the product manager). https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/56088344336 https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/5608...
  - richardARPANET 6y ago
    Happy to help, feel free to email me any questions.
- fireattack 6y ago
  Want something like this for a long time. The 50 row limit of the free tier doesn't fit my hobby project unfortunately, but it's glad to see someone developed such thing!
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    Yeah, this is a great service but the pricing doesn't make sense (even after the free tier). 10$ a month (!!!) and it still wouldn't fit my use case with only 1500 rows. The convenience is nice but considering Google/Microsoft is paying for most of the hosting, cell computation and so on, not sure why a wrapper around an API is so expensive.
    - wic8 6y ago
1wheel 6y ago
The NYT uses docs to author interactive articles that don't fit nicely in the CMS. I've missed that workflow a lot (comments and edits are amazing!); I just open sourced a tiny library that saves a doc as a text file. https://github.com/1wheel/doc2txt https://github.com/1wheel/doc2txt npx doc2txt 1StMiAtcY6bY6yEIQp5pVSGdIHSnZG-kFspdmsSzAJdE --outpath gettysburg.txt
- mericson 6y ago
  In addition to using Google Docs for articles that don’t fit nicely in the CMS, we also have our internal newsroom wiki powered by Google Docs, too. We’ve open sourced the code for that here: https://github.com/nytimes/library/ https://github.com/nytimes/library/
hawski 6y ago
I'm finishing up with a simplistic template for Zim wiki. That will enable me to have a website with nice Wysywig interface divorced from web bloat and limitiations, but also some of its convenience. https://zim-wiki.org/ https://zim-wiki.org/
patwalls 6y ago
I built an app that lets you create a blog from Google docs. https://youdontneedwp.com https://youdontneedwp.com
- davidsojevic 6y ago
  I remember this from a while back -- you originally wrote this as part of your live-streaming new projects effort, if I remember correctly? Your original HN thread about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18077446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18077446
- serf 6y ago
  I've always liked the idea, but i've never been keen on using it once I hit that "See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files" permission. I'm not that familiar with how Google provisions various permission schemes -- is there any way to do what you do with a bit more restrictive permissions than the manipulation of the entire Drive account?
ipsum2 6y ago
Reminds me of generating webpages from Microsoft Word. The issue is that the HTML looks pretty awful. For example, on the webpage, there's a bunch of tags that don't do anything and the inline style makes it difficult if you wanted to change the font family or color. 
- marvinblum 6y ago
 Yeah that's pretty ugly. Emvi [1] generates clean HTML. Here is an example for that: https://wiki.sts.wtf/read/Arma-3-Sync-oVlaBeQdAY https://wiki.sts.wtf/read/Arma-3-Sync-oVlaBeQdAY (the part within the "article-content" div). [1] https://emvi.com/ https://emvi.com/
 - baxtr 6y ago
 Use “Show HN” to show case it :-)
 - deleted 6y ago
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 - marvinblum 6y ago
 We showed Emvi and the new user interface we are working on right now already :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640054
- RupertWiser 6y ago
 The alternative is to hook into the Google Docs API which gives you a more structured response which you can then self style. Exporting HTML was the easy way out for me. I haven’t investigated the accessibility impact but the file sizes are minimal so it didn’t feel like a massive trade off.
andy_ppp 6y ago
I saw someone I was working with using Google docs for seed data, I actually think this is quite cool as long as it's performed in two steps (pull, insert) as you still want to be able to recreate offline or should Google docs explode (or price or cancellation).
iisthesloth 6y ago
Love using Docs as a source. A while back I wrote a service[1] which creates an API using Google Drive and Docs as a source. Docs are naturally pages, and the Drive folder structure builds the hierarchy/tree of pages using a pretty simple naming convention (Mainly for ordering). The CMS/collaborative aspect is great. Some things that aren't ideal are: - Seeing print-style page breaks in docs - Formatting images. Although, having Google host them is nice - The html Google Drive generates is inlined, inconsistent, and pretty nasty. I resorted to using markdown in Docs. 1. https://github.com/psaia/allwrite-docs https://github.com/psaia/allwrite-docs
- RupertWiser 6y ago
  Another solution that I explored a bit was using the google docs api. It returns a Json structure of the doc. I just used the drive export as a shortcut but you could totally create something neater with the drive api.
  - iisthesloth 6y ago
    Great idea. I will certainly look into that. Thanks!
janjanson 6y ago
I've run a little round robin/bracketed tournament website through the Google sheets JSON API once. It was a really easy way to have an interface for the organizers to update scores and players.
Traster 6y ago
So there's a few things I'd take issue with here. Firstly, writing a static site with a little bit of CSS is easier than ever. Not only are there lots of neat CSS files that will help you, but browsers actually are fairly good at functioining more or less the same. There was a time that writing corect CSS was a real art, but that's not really true as much today. Secondly, I think this is one of many examples of creating an incredibly complex solution to a trivial problem - the initial problem isn't a problem, and linking into an incredibly hefty cloud based system just seems nuts in my opinion. Finally, who exactly is looking to try and increase their dependence on google? I think part of my opinion comes from that latex/vim bent, where you're using very programmatic, specific idioms to get what you wrote, and if you're less comfortably with that then maybe you appreciate all the work of building some google docs based on monstrosity, but the more experience I've gained, the more I've learned to use the right tool for the job. Google docs isn't a blogging tool, so don't use it as one.
- Certhas 6y ago
  You misunderstood the problem. The important part is not writing the html, it's writing the text. This solution is centered around the best collaborative/cloud text editing that you can find for free. How does your solution address the scenario in the article of trying to work on the text of a post from a tablet? For me the Google dependency would be bothersome, but the reality is I still end up using Google Docs for authoring text collaboratively. (At least where Overleaf won't do)
  - Traster 6y ago
    I just don't understand how that's a problem, you can write the text in google docs, and copy/paste it into an html file and stick in the tags if you really want. My point is that going from the content you want, to the static webpage you want is probably 2 minutes work at the very most, and if that's a significant chunk of the time it took you to write the blog, then I'm not sure why you're bothering to write the blog in the first place, just use twitter.
Tade0 6y ago
Good work - bonus points for having it work with JS disabled - a surprising number of blogs need JS to even render for some reason. A while ago was facing a similar dilemma, so I went with this: https://sapper.svelte.dev/ https://sapper.svelte.dev/ Plus a one-step deploy process made in Ansible by a friend of mine. My take is that while Sapper isn't exactly production-ready, it's a otherwise competent static-site generator. I write my posts in markdown and the system adds styling and modifications like target=_blank for links in a consistent manner. Best thing about it is that I managed to use the experience from building my blog to help a friend who's an artist to set up his webcomic - also a static site. The friend in question knows how to use FTP but that's about the extent of his technical skills, so the process involves him modifying a JSON file by adding an object with the comic title, flavour text and of course image URL to an array, running the generator and uploading the result. The landscape of systems for this use case is pretty horrible, so this approach proved to be more pragmatic.
- gitgud 6y ago
  Does sapper work without JS too? I thought svelte was a JS library?
  - Tade0 6y ago
    Sapper's[0] CLI has an "export" command which generates a static site with optional JS for better navigation. Of course it works only if the backend side is simple and predictable, but nevertheless it does the job. [0] SSR framework based on Svelte.
tbstbstbs 6y ago
Great job, thanks for sharing! Some might like this adoption of the idea: I work in consulting and have to prepare presentations all of the time. Therefore, I created a Powerpoint generator that uses a Google Sheet as a source: http://demo.inf.university http://demo.inf.university <-- It doesn't look spectacular, but it saved me really a lot of time. “Can you prepare a briefing about X,Y,Z” – “Sure, it will take -cough- about 3 days” :-)
jacquesm 6y ago
Have you planned for what you will do if Google shuts down your account?
nicexe 6y ago
I don't really understand the argument against something like jekyll. There is no special styling as of now anyway so why would jekyll need any?
franciscop 6y ago
The first version of https://makersupv.com/ https://makersupv.com/ was made with Google Drive as well: - There was a spreadsheet with the list of articles and some meta-information such as publication date, "published" flag, etc. This was then extracted with https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db on a Node.js backend. - Then each article was written as a single google docs document, so we could edit them collaboratively. Meta: The front-end was built with https://picnicss.com/ https://picnicss.com/, which is a library I also created for this project.
bawana 6y ago
What's wrong with blogger? You know https://www.blogger.com/ https://www.blogger.com/ Also run by Google. Also subject to all their rules. But also robust with a simple clean interface. I wish there were a simple free way for me to enjoy free speech. I already pay for dropbox. Why can't dropbox let me assign a folder in my account become a blog.
ErikAugust 6y ago
I would only worry that the Google API access changes or gets pulled altogether. Otherwise it has some benefits, including collaboration.
K0SM0S 6y ago
I'm more of a Markdown, maybe LaTeX guy myself, but 100% down with the author's approach. The simplest "CI/CD", and closest to the material (plain text files), is usually the best in practice, especially for a one-man operation. Iterate into complexity on a need-to-basis.
- puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
  I personally like Pelican as a static blog generator that parses Markdown content. https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/
syntaxing 6y ago
This is awesome! I have a site made with Jekyll and it took a good amount of massaging to make it look somewhat presentable. I wish there was a way to integrate with Jekyll.
donohoe 6y ago
Check out ArchieML which the NYTimes built for when they use Google Docs for publishing http://archieml.org/ http://archieml.org/
32gbsd 6y ago
I mean its a ok concept but google is going to break it in 6 months.
- mav3rick 6y ago
  Yeah. They have broken Google Docs for so many years. What a shitty product, it's not like many people around the world use it. I bet you also use Duck Duck Go ? And don't like Google's interviewing process ? Or it's high salary to it's engineers ?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
JSavageOne 6y ago
And this is your only blog post?
sequoia 6y ago
> I could have set up a static site generator Instead of generating HTML from markdown & sticking it in a template, your posts are HTML and you stick them in a template. Instead of hand-writing the HTML, you're using an HTML WYSIWYG editor (google docs). Unless I'm missing something this is a static site generator. And if it suits your needs that's fantastic, sometimes I feel like markdown & git tracking is overkill as well (what I do). The primary thing holding me back from this is lack of code snippets. Incidentally how does it handle images? My take: https://sequoia.makes.software/lets-code-it-static-site-generator/ https://sequoia.makes.software/lets-code-it-static-site-gene...
avivo 6y ago
This is great, albeit very clunky (for reasons described others, e.g. inline CSS issues). What's amazing to me here is that I've gone through every single link I can find in these comments and haven't found anything close to a plug and play approach to creating static websites generated from Google Docs (say 1 hour at most for a fairly technical person to set up; just stringing together configuration options in e.g. Netlify, Gitlab, and perhaps Google Sheets for routing). This is not just academic. In the early days of the US COVID pandemic response, I helped instigate the creation of n95reuse.com — a collection of the best public information available on reusing n95 masks, which was used by a number of hospitals (now thankfully the more authoritative n95decon.org exists). This worked OK as Google Doc redirected from a memorable domain, but would have been much better as a dedicated site. But there was no good way to maintain that as we were rapidly gathering feedback and suggestions from folks on the front lines, and it would have been too much overhead for our small bandwidth constrained volunteer team. Our less professional site with a long redirected URL means that less people saw this, and more healthcare workers were likely using more unsafe protocols (or were spending crucial time replicating our research; we saw this everywhere). And people likely died. And this is not the first urgent project I've needed this sort of tool for. So if someone has done this plumbing and documents it, ideally with at least one good theme, please please, let me know (see profile for contact info, or respond to the thread on this here: https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1245147106697863168 https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1245147106697863168). At some point I might figure it out myself, but have not had a chance yet.
- binocarlos 6y ago
  We've been working hard on https://nocode.works https://nocode.works - which turns Google docs into nice looking websites - it's not pluggable yet but it doesn't require any setup on behalf of the user. We do have a template system though so it would be possible for a frontend dev to design their own wrapper for the content.
  - avivo 6y ago
    Very cool! For now "See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files" is definitely a deal breaker for many, but if you can restrict to one folder, that would be amazing. (As a user, I would currently use a throwaway account, and then share that Google folder with a real one). Also wasn't obvious how to remove the page footer; did I miss an option?
binocarlos 6y ago
Shameless plug: We've been working hard on https://nocode.works https://nocode.works - which turns Google docs into nice looking websites. We think it's perfect for documentation for non-technical companies who don't know what Markdown is.
- lucasverra 6y ago
  Hi there; i ve tested the product and it works ok. Now i have a question, what is the value of this ? If someone needs to publish content online so quick from gdocs with little to no branding style, why not just share a read only view of the google doc ?
  - binocarlos 6y ago
    We are thinking for people writing documentation, blogs or Intranets where there are many different pages and there is a more polished sense of branding. You are quite right that if you want to quickly publish a single page - using Google docs directly would be faster :-) Thanks for giving it a test!
xueyongg 6y ago
Omg, it is quite a good idea! Was wondering if that follows the same idea as using markdown as your post, and each post is actually just a markdown file? Here's my blog and each post is basically just a markdown file! Just wanted to share with all of you. https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-02-29-articles-in-second-half-of-feb https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-02-29-articles-in-sec...
xadz 6y ago
Based on Google's reputation of maintaining both products and API's I think I will give this a pass.
volkandkaya 6y ago
Shameless plug I built https://versoly.com/ https://versoly.com/ you can get a blog started is less than 5 minutes. I have sees a lot of folks talk about gatsby and static site generators but most never blog. They spend too much time playing with style sheets etc.
uniqo 6y ago
Hah, interesting project. I built something similar a while ago (https://github.com/nicolas-fricke/google-doc-blog https://github.com/nicolas-fricke/google-doc-blog) using article_json: https://github.com/Devex/article_json https://github.com/Devex/article_json With that, you also get support for embedded objects like Youtube videos and the like :) Feel free to reach out for more info!

398 points by RupertWiser 6y ago

God forbid if Google lifted their hands some day, can you even imagine how many million people will be impacted due to how many services ranging from emails to map apps to cloud services to web services, etc? Is it wise to give one entity power over so many things or its better to encourage a decentralized structure where multiple organizations control only bits of the pie?

duxup 6y ago
At least with takeout I know I have regular backups. That's more than most places offer.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  Have you looked through the takeout outputs though? They are completely worthless to most users. It's funny to me that a bunch of Google devs built the functionality and thought "ya this will do".
  - thinkingkong 6y ago
    I doubt the devs have much influence over the scope of the data output. The goal there is minimum for legal, compliance, or pr reasons.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    https://mboxfile.com/google-takeout/ https://mboxfile.com/google-takeout/
  - adrianmsmith 6y ago
    What's wrong with the data? I mainly care about Google Docs and Sheets, they're exported as Word and Excel (and there are other options if you don't like this formats), and the random sample of docs I tried in the output worked fine in Word and Excel.
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    How are the takeout outputs useless? Mail for example comes as a nice standard mbox
- lonelappde 6y ago
  Takeout doesn't work for users with substantial data.
  - duxup 6y ago
    What does it do? Does it not provide the data?
    - hobo_mark 6y ago
      From when I last tried (and retried several times), it fails to export everything so you only get a partial snapshot with random pieces missing.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Takeout is useless without Google. Also: gsuite doesn't really have a backup feature. You're locked in for all that it's worth.
  - duxup 6y ago
    Why is it useless?
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      Try restoring it. A backup is only good if you can make it work again, and an export function is only good if there is something else that you can import it back into.
      - duxup 6y ago
        I guess I'm missing how that relates to the comparison I made. Google at least lets me back things up. Most services do not allow it at all. So there's no restoring anywhere else at all, no chance. Having the data I could at least have a chance that some service might offer a rebuilt import option to pick up those google users ... or I could build it myself / at least have the information. To me that's still leaps and bounds better than any other options that I know of.
        notechback 6y ago
        The GDPR obliges all companies to provide an option for users to receive all data held on them; takeout and FB'd equivalent were implemented in response to that. For all other companies, at least if you are in the EU, you should he able to request the data by eg email and they are obliged to send it. You just don't know what format you'll get.
        duxup 6y ago
        I believe takeout predates the GDPR ... by a wide margin. As for all other companies they might be obliged to send it, but I don't see many ways to do so. That still make's google's method way better IMO.
austin223 6y ago
Absolutely agree. Unfortunately I don’t think nations like the US will ever have the balls to break up their wonder children.
- el_programmador 6y ago
  Nations are ultimately made up of people and they are subject to peoples' pressure. Its the people who we must convince and wake them from their deep slumber.
- hencq 6y ago
  You mean like the US did with AT&T? I'm not sure if they 'have the balls' currently, but they have in the past and it's not inconceivable they would do so again. Microsoft came close to it as well.
  - zokier 6y ago
    I do point out that US vs AT&T did first major anti-trust settlement in 1913, and the breakup ultimately happened in 1984, or about 70 years later. So maybe we'll see Google breakup too in 2084 or around that time..
  - lonelappde 6y ago
    AT&T reformed as regional monopolies in far less time than it took the government to break up the national monopoly.
zokier 6y ago
Sure, it is a genuine concern. But I find the context for the comment here bit funny considering how much the world runs on top of gdocs etc, the risk of losing the source of personal blog is drop in a ocean. And while there of course are no guarantees, I at least would expect fair warning before stuff like docs is killed.
- lonelappde 6y ago
  The ocean is made of drops.
crazygringo 6y ago
Well, I don't need to trust Google's employees, I trust its shareholders wanting to make money, which will never stop. Since Google's popular products all contribute to making money in the end, they're not going to stop. Shareholders just wouldn't let it happen. There's a chain of accountability here that goes employees > C suite > board > shareholders. So I don't quite see what situation you're worried about here.
- judge2020 6y ago
  if by some magical event Alphabet/Google is able to shut down their free versions of their Office apps and rely solely on G Suite/YouTube/Waymo/etc without losing money, I don't doubt they would do it. If that event will ever happen is still a mystery and is probably unlikely to happen within my/our lifetimes.
- lonelappde 6y ago
  Google's shareholders don't hold substantial voting power. Accountability practically ends at CEO.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    That's just so factually untrue it's hard to know what to tell you. Do you understand how corporate boards work? How large shareholders get their own board seats? How boards hire and fire members of the management team? The idea of a toothless board is a complete fiction. I don't know where you got the idea, but it couldn't be more wrong. (Perhaps you're confusing it with boards where a single shareholder has more than 50% of shares, thus making the board largely irrelevant because the shareholder controls it. But even in that case, the CEO effectively reports to that shareholder, and there have been many, many, many cases of underperforming CEO's being fired. It happens all the time.)
    - johannes1234321 6y ago
      Point here is that in Alphabet the voting power is for the largest part within the founders. Other shareholders can't do much against them.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
I don't think the cost of losing things is as high as you imagine. You can use X until it fails and then you can use Y. I also don't think your doomsday scenario makes much sense either. What do you mean "lifted their hands" and why would it happen out of the blue with zero warning? Though I'll repeat: so what? I don't think a decentralized system is much better in this regard. It just means things rot at a more staggered pace. Service A shuts down on year 0, service B shuts down on year 10, etc. It's just a different trade-off, not the panacea we like to pretend it is.

krm01 6y ago

After building a number of [1] projects that are powered by Google Docs, I recently realised that it also means that countries (like China) where Google is blocked, won't be able to access your content. https://upstart.me https://upstart.me (powered by Google Docs)

sfusato 6y ago
FAQ not expanding. Console errors: Blocked loading mixed active content “http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js” http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.mi... upstart.me Request to access cookie or storage on “<URL>” was blocked because it came from a tracker and content blocking is enabled. 6 ReferenceError: $ is not defined script.js:1:1 Blocked loading mixed active content “http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js” http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.mi... upstart.me Loading failed for the <script> with source “http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js” http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.mi.... upstart.me:179:1 ReferenceError: $ is not defined
- judge2020 6y ago
 Have you visited the Cloudflare main website by chance? cdnjs doesn't serve cookies unless you've visited cloudflare.com yourself. Either way the cdnjs jquery isn't a tracker.
 - shanipribadi 6y ago
 mixed active content was why the browser blocked it. the cdnjs link is http, while the site is https.
- scott113341 6y ago
 Looks interesting, I signed up! FWIW, I ran into the same issue (Chrome): https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1910118/81509549-a0f8dd00-92c8-11ea-941e-8d18d66b3127.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1910118/81509549-a...

lkc9 6y ago

This isn't directly related to the post but the root of this website is hilarious: https://benwiser.com/ https://benwiser.com/

superhuzza 6y ago
Came here to say the same thing. It's weird, I loved the effect. I showed it to my partner and she found it terrifying though!
miguelmota 6y ago
On mobile I just see a broken static image of the person's head.
- devbat8712 6y ago
  Tilt your phone.
modeless 6y ago
I love it! I think the rendering could be improved by projecting the image to compensate for screen tilt, in addition to rotating the head.

_Chief 6y ago

seeing secrets.txt in the repo gave me a fright for a second and it's not even my project

mikeryan 6y ago

It’s a bit strange hitting the google redirect notice when linking from the site. You also might want to put your .idea directory and secrets in a .gitignore

netsharc 6y ago
If I were to fork his code I'd fix that the first thing, I'd hate to annoy my users like that. Reminds me of this jwz post (you have to copy and paste manually since he doesn't like HN as a referrer: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/02/looking-forward-into-the-past/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/02/looking-forward-into-the-pa... ).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gibolt 6y ago
  This feels like such a weirdly specific block... You have a blog that you want people to read, but not people who come from a specific source
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    This is why browsers are working to remove user-agent and referer. Almost all real world use is tracking and nonsensical blocks.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      I was familiar with removing user-agent work, but what's this about removing referrer? Can you give a link?
      - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
        Firefox removed the path in 2018 while in private browsing, now their tracking protection is in normal mode too so I imagine it will happen there as well. I'm guessing the only thing stopping them from removing it totally is some sites break if they cant see the domain you came from. https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-data-leaks-by-stripping-path-information-in-http-referrers/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-data...

elondaits 6y ago

I recently used Google Sheets as a CMS for a couple of projects. In my case I had a server-side script which read the sheets, converted the data to JSON and saved it on a file which was then fetched by the JS client. The conversion only had to run when there were updates (e.g once a day). It was really convenient in my particular case because all users where familiar with Google Sheets, already had users and passwords, and I had good granular control over permissions.

ignoramous 6y ago
You might also be interested in Glide, helps build mobile-apps with Google Sheets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163081
mettamage 6y ago
How does it work when you have a lot of text and you need to put that in one cell? Doesn't that get a bit too unruly?
- vijaybritto 6y ago
  I dont think we need to care about google sheet's looks while using it as a DB. This approach is pretty good and fast
  - mettamage 6y ago
    Ah, fair enough. I totally forgot that reason, haha.
czzarr 6y ago
If you have more needs like this, you could try out Awesome Table. https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/56088344336 https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/5608... (I'm the product manager)

butz 6y ago

What about just using Google Sites? They have updated UI and improved functionality quite a bit. You can even link your own domain.

stOneskull 6y ago
Google put an annoying link on there called "Report this site". Maybe there's a way to take that off now but that really sucked. What happens if some idiots report your site for no reason?

factorialboy 6y ago

The URL to your GitLab project goes via a Google redirect. I'm guessing this in an unintentional side-effect of using Google Docs as CMS?

ForrestN 6y ago

This is a nice idea, especially for a case where a website is collaboratively edited. I don't love Google Docs for solo projects, and I don't enjoy using it, but its collaborative editing features are so good and reliable that I can't escape it. Being able to suggest and accept changes with commenting among a group of people would be really nice for a website for a collective, say. That said, a bit of small, hopefully constructive feedback. The impact of this would be a bit bigger if there were more blog posts, so that by the time you reveal you're using google docs it feels more like a practical application and less like a very quick demo. Also, while I understand that there's a sort of "coder who doesn't do design" aesthetic, it might be good to at least change the colors a bit so that there's a bit more magic of transformation. This looks a bit too much like, well, a Google doc, and you want to establish that something cool is going on that couldn't be done with just an index of publicly visible google docs.

deleted 6y ago
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remote 6y ago
It's a really cool idea Google codelabs has been using for a few years to provide a unified way to write development tutorials[1]. 1. https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools/ https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools/
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Not to be confused with Google Colab! Which provides shared Jupyter Notebook, which also can be great for writing markdown cells, with graphs and code interspersed.
leesalminen 6y ago
We’ve been using a shared Google Docs folder to manage our app’s release notes. We parse the folder in reverse chronological order, paginate 5 at a time and use their doc to HTML converter API. We then cache in Redis for performance. Works great and keeps the development team away from having to update it. Product/support can edit to their content!

z3t4 6y ago

Would be interesting with more details on how this works. Like how the URL works and how the pages are styled. Is there any services needed beside google docs, etc.

ignoramous 6y ago

My first encounter with a docs -> website was the now-defunct joelewis' hexopress.com. The code; however, is opensource [0]. There's a dated, unmaintained Google Docs to Markdown converter [1] which can be used as a source for a static site generator like Hugo [2]. This is particular interesting since folks can style content as they normally would from within Google Docs and have it show up with the same styling on a webpage, rather than write HTML themselves. [0] https://github.com/joelewis/hexopress https://github.com/joelewis/hexopress [1] https://github.com/mangini/gdocs2md https://github.com/mangini/gdocs2md [2] https://gohugo.io/content-management/formats/ https://gohugo.io/content-management/formats/

leonidasv 6y ago
As an alternative, Gatsby — a JS-powered static site generator — has a plugin for Google Docs that appears to be in active development. https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-google-docs/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-google-docs/

WheelsAtLarge 6y ago

Hey all, keep in mind that this is an experiment and the OP is therefore looking for input from users. Don't look at it from a finished product point of view but as a starting point and give your ideas. I think this is a great solution a quick in office CMS for in house projects.

londons_explore 6y ago

It would be cool if it was 100% live... Ie. with every keystroke the website is updated. Does the Google Docs API have some kind of event based notification of new keystrokes you could hook into?

schaefer 6y ago
As a reader, i don't want to be anywhere near somebody's half-finished first draft. different personalities, I suppose.

lihaciudaniel 6y ago

>wordpress (I really don’t like wordpress). I really don't like your blog

city41 6y ago

This website: https://www.fgbg.art/ https://www.fgbg.art/, is powered by this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W8RE885PVF2z3L9KU9LSCS3y5mpAMldAuoEfcuCcLms https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W8RE885PVF2z3L9KU9LS... The spreadsheet not being normalized is a bit annoying, but I could fix that if I really wanted to. All in all, I actually find using Google as a data source like this works pretty well.

onesmalluser 6y ago
What add-on are you using to do that? I've been playing around using Lovely Table and Awesome Table for this purpose but not really sure which one I ultimately want.
- city41 6y ago
  The site is built with Gatsby using gatsby-source-google-sheets. The source is here: https://github.com/city41/fgbg https://github.com/city41/fgbg (warning, it's pretty terrible. I built this thing very rapidly as at its heart it's really just an experiment). https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-google-sheets/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-google-sheet...
- czzarr 6y ago
  Awesome Table product manager here, let me know if I can help.
jonnydubowsky 6y ago
I just spent 20 minutes browsing your site, revisiting these epic scenes. Thanks for sharing!

madsohm 6y ago

I run my wishlist from a Google Sheets document. It's a bit annoying that you can't have gaps in rows in the spreadsheet, since fetching as JSON will only return up until the first gap.

throwawaysea 6y ago

Cool idea, but I worry about over reliance on Google or other big tech players, especially after their recent steps to ramp up censorship. Another example is that Medium blocked many informative COVID-19 posts recently despite them being thoughtful and necessary discussions, especially given the repeated failings of the WHO. What’s a great blog platform that features a lack of censorship or protection against censorship as a feature?

xnxn 6y ago

I recently learned (via Rich Harris's recent Svelte Society Day talk[1]) that the New York Times does something like this using a custom markup language called ArchieML[2]. [1]: https://youtu.be/luM5uobewhA?t=1301 https://youtu.be/luM5uobewhA?t=1301 [2]: http://archieml.org/ http://archieml.org/

soared 6y ago

Blot.im does this but with dropbox and its amazing. Since you use word docs instead of g docs the formatting transfers over perfectly. Super easy setup and $20/yr. I’ve been using it for 2 or 3 years and it’s great. Npzero.com is my blog if you want to see an example. There are much prettier themes you can choose from as well. I have a chrome book so sometimes I write in g docs, export to word, and upload to Dropbox’s webapp and make final adjustments in their online editor. No affiliation, just a great product.

nngrey 6y ago
I use Blot as well and have been very pleased with it.

obeattie 6y ago

I’ve been thinking about going the other way a bit recently: having bots consume input from and add their output to a Google Doc. There are so many processes in most businesses which involve many humans collaborating on templatised documents. Google Docs/Sheets fits into these workflows very well, but there’s often scope for some partial automation in there too - pulling information from databases and outside sources and keeping it in sync, etc. Developing custom web apps for each case is too much effort for too little reward, takes users out of a familiar (and well-liked) interface which updates in real-time, makes you reimplement permission models, etc. Not something I’ve explored properly yet so I don’t know if the APIs are rich enough to make this easy, but I would really like to give it a look.

pier25 6y ago
I used that approach for a reporting system and it worked pretty well. It was easy to hit the sheets api rate limit but it was just a matter of waiting a bit between requests. The node script was triggered hourly with Heroku scheduler.

marvinblum 6y ago

You can do this with Emvi [1] too. It works like a headless CMS. I wrote a wiki for a German gaming community [2]. The project is available on GitHub [3] if anyone is interested and can easily be adopted to your own project. The articles fit a blog very well as they don't use pages and therefor are continuous. The API spits out clean HTML. [1] https://emvi.com/ https://emvi.com/ [2] https://wiki.sts.wtf/ https://wiki.sts.wtf/ [3] https://github.com/Special-Tactical-Service/wiki https://github.com/Special-Tactical-Service/wiki

magicalhippo 6y ago

Way back I considered using Microsoft Word as my content editor for my blog, and wrote a PHP script that converted .docx files to static HTML. To publish all I had to do was upload a new .docx file to a given directory on my shared host and wait for the script to run. It converted the Word "Heading 1" etc styles to some CSS class, and had support for extracting inline images etc. I relied on convention for certain things like post title, and it didn't support too fancy things in the Word document. At that time .docx was rather new, so I wasn't sure if it would stick around. Also I wasn't sure this was the best idea ever, so I ended up with something else. But it was a fun adventure.

Hello71 6y ago
is there any benefit of that over the built-in html export function (which also works terribly)?
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  Well the key point was to use Word for basic content editing and layout, but have control over the styling on the website part of things (ie via my own style sheet). As I recall the generated HTML from Word was quite a mess, and it would be non-trivial to change the styling of it. It also allowed the pages to be easily integrated into my blog, with first paragraph being visible on the main page etc. Mostly though it was just a "can it be done" experiment :)
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richardARPANET 6y ago

Shameless plug incoming... I made the equivalent but for APIs using Google Sheets :) https://sheet2api.com/ https://sheet2api.com/

metrix 6y ago
i'm using Google Sheets for a Coronavirus Tracker http://amarillo.land/coronavirus.html http://amarillo.land/coronavirus.html but i'm not enthused with the performance. This looks very interesting!
- czzarr 6y ago
  Depending on what you're trying to achieve, you could try Awesome Table (I'm the product manager). https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/56088344336 https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/5608...
- richardARPANET 6y ago
  Happy to help, feel free to email me any questions.
fireattack 6y ago
Want something like this for a long time. The 50 row limit of the free tier doesn't fit my hobby project unfortunately, but it's glad to see someone developed such thing!
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Yeah, this is a great service but the pricing doesn't make sense (even after the free tier). 10$ a month (!!!) and it still wouldn't fit my use case with only 1500 rows. The convenience is nice but considering Google/Microsoft is paying for most of the hosting, cell computation and so on, not sure why a wrapper around an API is so expensive.
  - wic8 6y ago

1wheel 6y ago

The NYT uses docs to author interactive articles that don't fit nicely in the CMS. I've missed that workflow a lot (comments and edits are amazing!); I just open sourced a tiny library that saves a doc as a text file. https://github.com/1wheel/doc2txt https://github.com/1wheel/doc2txt npx doc2txt 1StMiAtcY6bY6yEIQp5pVSGdIHSnZG-kFspdmsSzAJdE --outpath gettysburg.txt

mericson 6y ago
In addition to using Google Docs for articles that don’t fit nicely in the CMS, we also have our internal newsroom wiki powered by Google Docs, too. We’ve open sourced the code for that here: https://github.com/nytimes/library/ https://github.com/nytimes/library/

hawski 6y ago

I'm finishing up with a simplistic template for Zim wiki. That will enable me to have a website with nice Wysywig interface divorced from web bloat and limitiations, but also some of its convenience. https://zim-wiki.org/ https://zim-wiki.org/

patwalls 6y ago

I built an app that lets you create a blog from Google docs. https://youdontneedwp.com https://youdontneedwp.com

davidsojevic 6y ago
I remember this from a while back -- you originally wrote this as part of your live-streaming new projects effort, if I remember correctly? Your original HN thread about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18077446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18077446
serf 6y ago
I've always liked the idea, but i've never been keen on using it once I hit that "See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files" permission. I'm not that familiar with how Google provisions various permission schemes -- is there any way to do what you do with a bit more restrictive permissions than the manipulation of the entire Drive account?

ipsum2 6y ago

Reminds me of generating webpages from Microsoft Word. The issue is that the HTML looks pretty awful. For example, on the webpage, there's a bunch of tags that don't do anything and the inline style makes it difficult if you wanted to change the font family or color.

marvinblum 6y ago
Yeah that's pretty ugly. Emvi [1] generates clean HTML. Here is an example for that: https://wiki.sts.wtf/read/Arma-3-Sync-oVlaBeQdAY https://wiki.sts.wtf/read/Arma-3-Sync-oVlaBeQdAY (the part within the "article-content" div). [1] https://emvi.com/ https://emvi.com/
- baxtr 6y ago
  Use “Show HN” to show case it :-)
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  - marvinblum 6y ago
    We showed Emvi and the new user interface we are working on right now already :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640054
RupertWiser 6y ago
The alternative is to hook into the Google Docs API which gives you a more structured response which you can then self style. Exporting HTML was the easy way out for me. I haven’t investigated the accessibility impact but the file sizes are minimal so it didn’t feel like a massive trade off.

andy_ppp 6y ago

I saw someone I was working with using Google docs for seed data, I actually think this is quite cool as long as it's performed in two steps (pull, insert) as you still want to be able to recreate offline or should Google docs explode (or price or cancellation).

iisthesloth 6y ago

Love using Docs as a source. A while back I wrote a service[1] which creates an API using Google Drive and Docs as a source. Docs are naturally pages, and the Drive folder structure builds the hierarchy/tree of pages using a pretty simple naming convention (Mainly for ordering). The CMS/collaborative aspect is great. Some things that aren't ideal are: - Seeing print-style page breaks in docs - Formatting images. Although, having Google host them is nice - The html Google Drive generates is inlined, inconsistent, and pretty nasty. I resorted to using markdown in Docs. 1. https://github.com/psaia/allwrite-docs https://github.com/psaia/allwrite-docs

RupertWiser 6y ago
Another solution that I explored a bit was using the google docs api. It returns a Json structure of the doc. I just used the drive export as a shortcut but you could totally create something neater with the drive api.
- iisthesloth 6y ago
  Great idea. I will certainly look into that. Thanks!

janjanson 6y ago

I've run a little round robin/bracketed tournament website through the Google sheets JSON API once. It was a really easy way to have an interface for the organizers to update scores and players.

Traster 6y ago

So there's a few things I'd take issue with here. Firstly, writing a static site with a little bit of CSS is easier than ever. Not only are there lots of neat CSS files that will help you, but browsers actually are fairly good at functioining more or less the same. There was a time that writing corect CSS was a real art, but that's not really true as much today. Secondly, I think this is one of many examples of creating an incredibly complex solution to a trivial problem - the initial problem isn't a problem, and linking into an incredibly hefty cloud based system just seems nuts in my opinion. Finally, who exactly is looking to try and increase their dependence on google? I think part of my opinion comes from that latex/vim bent, where you're using very programmatic, specific idioms to get what you wrote, and if you're less comfortably with that then maybe you appreciate all the work of building some google docs based on monstrosity, but the more experience I've gained, the more I've learned to use the right tool for the job. Google docs isn't a blogging tool, so don't use it as one.

Certhas 6y ago
You misunderstood the problem. The important part is not writing the html, it's writing the text. This solution is centered around the best collaborative/cloud text editing that you can find for free. How does your solution address the scenario in the article of trying to work on the text of a post from a tablet? For me the Google dependency would be bothersome, but the reality is I still end up using Google Docs for authoring text collaboratively. (At least where Overleaf won't do)
- Traster 6y ago
  I just don't understand how that's a problem, you can write the text in google docs, and copy/paste it into an html file and stick in the tags if you really want. My point is that going from the content you want, to the static webpage you want is probably 2 minutes work at the very most, and if that's a significant chunk of the time it took you to write the blog, then I'm not sure why you're bothering to write the blog in the first place, just use twitter.

Tade0 6y ago

Good work - bonus points for having it work with JS disabled - a surprising number of blogs need JS to even render for some reason. A while ago was facing a similar dilemma, so I went with this: https://sapper.svelte.dev/ https://sapper.svelte.dev/ Plus a one-step deploy process made in Ansible by a friend of mine. My take is that while Sapper isn't exactly production-ready, it's a otherwise competent static-site generator. I write my posts in markdown and the system adds styling and modifications like target=_blank for links in a consistent manner. Best thing about it is that I managed to use the experience from building my blog to help a friend who's an artist to set up his webcomic - also a static site. The friend in question knows how to use FTP but that's about the extent of his technical skills, so the process involves him modifying a JSON file by adding an object with the comic title, flavour text and of course image URL to an array, running the generator and uploading the result. The landscape of systems for this use case is pretty horrible, so this approach proved to be more pragmatic.

gitgud 6y ago
Does sapper work without JS too? I thought svelte was a JS library?
- Tade0 6y ago
  Sapper's[0] CLI has an "export" command which generates a static site with optional JS for better navigation. Of course it works only if the backend side is simple and predictable, but nevertheless it does the job. [0] SSR framework based on Svelte.

tbstbstbs 6y ago

Great job, thanks for sharing! Some might like this adoption of the idea: I work in consulting and have to prepare presentations all of the time. Therefore, I created a Powerpoint generator that uses a Google Sheet as a source: http://demo.inf.university http://demo.inf.university <-- It doesn't look spectacular, but it saved me really a lot of time. “Can you prepare a briefing about X,Y,Z” – “Sure, it will take -cough- about 3 days” :-)

jacquesm 6y ago

Have you planned for what you will do if Google shuts down your account?

nicexe 6y ago

I don't really understand the argument against something like jekyll. There is no special styling as of now anyway so why would jekyll need any?

franciscop 6y ago

The first version of https://makersupv.com/ https://makersupv.com/ was made with Google Drive as well: - There was a spreadsheet with the list of articles and some meta-information such as publication date, "published" flag, etc. This was then extracted with https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db on a Node.js backend. - Then each article was written as a single google docs document, so we could edit them collaboratively. Meta: The front-end was built with https://picnicss.com/ https://picnicss.com/, which is a library I also created for this project.

bawana 6y ago

What's wrong with blogger? You know https://www.blogger.com/ https://www.blogger.com/ Also run by Google. Also subject to all their rules. But also robust with a simple clean interface. I wish there were a simple free way for me to enjoy free speech. I already pay for dropbox. Why can't dropbox let me assign a folder in my account become a blog.

ErikAugust 6y ago

I would only worry that the Google API access changes or gets pulled altogether. Otherwise it has some benefits, including collaboration.

K0SM0S 6y ago

I'm more of a Markdown, maybe LaTeX guy myself, but 100% down with the author's approach. The simplest "CI/CD", and closest to the material (plain text files), is usually the best in practice, especially for a one-man operation. Iterate into complexity on a need-to-basis.

puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
I personally like Pelican as a static blog generator that parses Markdown content. https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/

syntaxing 6y ago

This is awesome! I have a site made with Jekyll and it took a good amount of massaging to make it look somewhat presentable. I wish there was a way to integrate with Jekyll.

donohoe 6y ago

Check out ArchieML which the NYTimes built for when they use Google Docs for publishing http://archieml.org/ http://archieml.org/

32gbsd 6y ago

I mean its a ok concept but google is going to break it in 6 months.

mav3rick 6y ago
Yeah. They have broken Google Docs for so many years. What a shitty product, it's not like many people around the world use it. I bet you also use Duck Duck Go ? And don't like Google's interviewing process ? Or it's high salary to it's engineers ?

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JSavageOne 6y ago

And this is your only blog post?

sequoia 6y ago

> I could have set up a static site generator Instead of generating HTML from markdown & sticking it in a template, your posts are HTML and you stick them in a template. Instead of hand-writing the HTML, you're using an HTML WYSIWYG editor (google docs). Unless I'm missing something this is a static site generator. And if it suits your needs that's fantastic, sometimes I feel like markdown & git tracking is overkill as well (what I do). The primary thing holding me back from this is lack of code snippets. Incidentally how does it handle images? My take: https://sequoia.makes.software/lets-code-it-static-site-generator/ https://sequoia.makes.software/lets-code-it-static-site-gene...

avivo 6y ago

This is great, albeit very clunky (for reasons described others, e.g. inline CSS issues). What's amazing to me here is that I've gone through every single link I can find in these comments and haven't found anything close to a plug and play approach to creating static websites generated from Google Docs (say 1 hour at most for a fairly technical person to set up; just stringing together configuration options in e.g. Netlify, Gitlab, and perhaps Google Sheets for routing). This is not just academic. In the early days of the US COVID pandemic response, I helped instigate the creation of n95reuse.com — a collection of the best public information available on reusing n95 masks, which was used by a number of hospitals (now thankfully the more authoritative n95decon.org exists). This worked OK as Google Doc redirected from a memorable domain, but would have been much better as a dedicated site. But there was no good way to maintain that as we were rapidly gathering feedback and suggestions from folks on the front lines, and it would have been too much overhead for our small bandwidth constrained volunteer team. Our less professional site with a long redirected URL means that less people saw this, and more healthcare workers were likely using more unsafe protocols (or were spending crucial time replicating our research; we saw this everywhere). And people likely died. And this is not the first urgent project I've needed this sort of tool for. So if someone has done this plumbing and documents it, ideally with at least one good theme, please please, let me know (see profile for contact info, or respond to the thread on this here: https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1245147106697863168 https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1245147106697863168). At some point I might figure it out myself, but have not had a chance yet.

binocarlos 6y ago
We've been working hard on https://nocode.works https://nocode.works - which turns Google docs into nice looking websites - it's not pluggable yet but it doesn't require any setup on behalf of the user. We do have a template system though so it would be possible for a frontend dev to design their own wrapper for the content.
- avivo 6y ago
  Very cool! For now "See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files" is definitely a deal breaker for many, but if you can restrict to one folder, that would be amazing. (As a user, I would currently use a throwaway account, and then share that Google folder with a real one). Also wasn't obvious how to remove the page footer; did I miss an option?

binocarlos 6y ago

Shameless plug: We've been working hard on https://nocode.works https://nocode.works - which turns Google docs into nice looking websites. We think it's perfect for documentation for non-technical companies who don't know what Markdown is.

lucasverra 6y ago
Hi there; i ve tested the product and it works ok. Now i have a question, what is the value of this ? If someone needs to publish content online so quick from gdocs with little to no branding style, why not just share a read only view of the google doc ?
- binocarlos 6y ago
  We are thinking for people writing documentation, blogs or Intranets where there are many different pages and there is a more polished sense of branding. You are quite right that if you want to quickly publish a single page - using Google docs directly would be faster :-) Thanks for giving it a test!

xueyongg 6y ago

Omg, it is quite a good idea! Was wondering if that follows the same idea as using markdown as your post, and each post is actually just a markdown file? Here's my blog and each post is basically just a markdown file! Just wanted to share with all of you. https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-02-29-articles-in-second-half-of-feb https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-02-29-articles-in-sec...

xadz 6y ago

Based on Google's reputation of maintaining both products and API's I think I will give this a pass.

volkandkaya 6y ago

Shameless plug I built https://versoly.com/ https://versoly.com/ you can get a blog started is less than 5 minutes. I have sees a lot of folks talk about gatsby and static site generators but most never blog. They spend too much time playing with style sheets etc.

uniqo 6y ago

Hah, interesting project. I built something similar a while ago (https://github.com/nicolas-fricke/google-doc-blog https://github.com/nicolas-fricke/google-doc-blog) using article_json: https://github.com/Devex/article_json https://github.com/Devex/article_json With that, you also get support for embedded objects like Youtube videos and the like :) Feel free to reach out for more info!