7 ms·
Show HN: I made a platform to publish my Google Docs files as blogs
- tyingq 5y agoCurious if you'll be affected by "Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering". https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Based-Rendering-Update.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-... Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858
- lewisjoe 5y agoAuthor here! :) No it won't. I was the one who submitted that piece to HN, and the first thing I was worried was how it will break hexo.press. Apparently, only extensions are affected and hexo.press is a service that uses Google's meta APIs, which are not affected.
- lasagnaphil 5y agoFrom looking at the code, I think it's basically just downloading the relevant google docs files as docx (or markdown if the file's just .md) and converting it into octopress, so I don't think it will matter. Source: https://github.com/joelewis/hexopress/blob/55f55c39136ef301fd636c23d8a1a44f8e5f3e2a/hexo/tasks.py#L333 https://github.com/joelewis/hexopress/blob/55f55c39136ef301f...
- codazoda 5y agoThis comment caught my eye because I use a lot of markdown. What do you mean about downloading the file as markdown if it's just an .md? I haven't ever created a .md in Google Docs and I don't see a way to download one. Edit: After looking at the code, I think the comment applies to Google Drive and not Google Docs. I only use Google Drive via the web interface and it's a bit of a pain to "create" an md file via that interface.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lewisjoe 5y agoI deleted my previous comment since it was irrelevant. Yes, you are right. I wanted to write markdown files and make them as posts. So I wrote that piece of code that, looks for md files as well, in addition to Google Doc files – for publishing as posts. Helps me write code-blocks heavy posts in markdown directly in Google Drive, using markdown extensions. Google Docs is yet to support code blocks and by now I doubt they ever will :(
- lasagnaphil 5y agoYeah I agree, it really sucks that really basic things like equations, code-blocks, and captions in images aren't supported in Google Docs, it's an incredible dealbreaker.
- hooloovoo_zoo 5y agoGoogle slides doesn't even support vector graphics. Given the tech-savvy nature of people at Google, I've long suspected that nobody there actually uses Google Docs.
- murkle 5y agoThat's not quite true. You can import EMF (and SVG with some effort) https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/115814/how-can-i-import-a-vector-drawing-into-google-slides https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/115814/how...
- hooloovoo_zoo 5y agoI've never found any of these kinds of approaches to actually work; I always end up with a rasterized image that I could have gotten by just taking a screenshot.
- keehun 5y agoCongratulation on shipping! The experience was flawless and quick. Two things I noticed which I hope you will consider fixing: - It was trivially easy to expose the user's google/gmail address by typing in a random URL within the user's blog. The 404 page exposes the user's email address. [0] Probably better to have some UUID-email mapping that is secret. - When I clicked "Delete Account/Blog", the application did not remove itself from Google's "Apps with access to your account" page and was still showing up as an active integration. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/PG8Em4S.png https://i.imgur.com/PG8Em4S.png
- lewisjoe 5y agoThank you for pointing this out. #1 - I'll deactivate debug mode ASAP and the 404 page shouldn't have any extra info henceforth. #2 - Yes, it's better to revoke google's scopes as well. I'll work on this one.
- throwaways885 5y agoDjango debug is quite dangerous to expose online. Are you hosting this on your own computers?
- lewisjoe 5y ago> It was trivially easy to expose the user's google/gmail address by typing in a random URL within the user's blog. This one is fixed now!
- redeux 5y agoI went to the GitHub repo you included at the bottom of the page and I noticed you don’t include a license. Without a license everyone who clones, forks, or otherwise uses you code is violating your copyright. Maybe that’s your intention, but if not you should consider adding an appropriate license that defines what use of your code is and isn’t allowed.
- adawg4 5y agoLol you could live edit blogs made with hexopress using Hitsnag.com too add info to them on the go! This is really cool.
- ignoramous 5y agoHi, I was following the project for a while but lost track. What's changed since 4 years ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857137
- lewisjoe 5y agoI lost the domain name (https://hexopress.com https://hexopress.com), but got a better one: it's https://hexo.press https://hexo.press now Feature wise, the web UI now lets you write a small "About" piece that gets populated in your blog's sidebar. Google Analytics support is something I added sometime later, but you might want to take a loot at that one too :)
- tito 5y agoCurious if anyone has seen something like this to publish Mailchimp newsletters on the web. Mailchimp's "archive" page is weak. I have a weekly newsletter on carbon removal, published on Mailchimp. My site [1] starts with a script that pulls from the Mailchimp API, compiles pages and an archive, and deploys on vercel. Plus some static files for homepage/header/footer are pulled in. [1] https://tito.co https://tito.co
- lewisjoe 5y agoCan't you do that with a simple zappier integration? Just thinking out loud. When I wrote hexo.press I also wanted to make a full-featured CMS with Google Drive as the backend, but then I realized a lot of this can be achieved with Zapier and can be done generically as well - adaptable for Microsoft OneDrive, Zoho Workdrive or Google Drive Did you already try Zapier?
- tito 5y agoI adore Zapier! But how would I use it in this case? I can imagine triggering with a new Mailchimp campaign, but where would it post to?
- xNeil 5y agoYou could set up a Zapier integration with Ghost (ghost.org). Use Zapier to publish every Mailchimp newsletter as a Ghost article maybe? Hope I helped.
- kodah 5y agoThis is a badass project, especially for one regarded as a time filler. Congrats!
- rajasimon 5y agoThis is very nice. Once again I am happy that another Django project especially OSS noticed in HN
- tpmx 5y agoWas curious how the document conversion happened: It's using Pandoc to convert .docx files downloaded from Google Docs into markdown files. Hadn't seen Pandoc before. It's a Haskell library/cli that supports a large number of input/output document formats in varying degrees of completeness: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc https://github.com/jgm/pandoc
- ecesena 5y agoThis is amazing! Do you have a plan to support subfolders? I'd love to use something like this for docs instead of a blog. I wrote about my setup here: https://0x0ece.medium.com/docs-for-an-open-source-project-b7119b3690f2 https://0x0ece.medium.com/docs-for-an-open-source-project-b7... I manually manage the md files inside my repo and publish via jekyll+github pages. But I do most of the actual writing/commenting work in gdocs, so automating gdoc -> md is just awesome!
- amelius 5y agoFunny, Medium spent all this time working on (and blogging about) the perfect editor, and you simply use Google Docs.
- earthboundkid 5y agoThis is common in journalism. The NYT created ArchieML with this workflow in mind and Politico has Gootenberg which uses Google Docs.
- spamalot159 5y agoThis is pretty cool! There is a whole wave of young people that are using Chromebooks and therefore Google Docs at school every day. They will be most comfortable with writing in Gdocs. I could see a product like this becoming very popular. I mostly used MS Word to write essays at school growing up and to this day my ideas flow best when I have Word open on a desktop computer.
- luke2m 5y agoLooks great! I’m a “hackers with terminals and gits” but may recommend this.
- syntaxing 5y agoWhoa neat, I only skimmed through the demo but are there ways to add images?
- sam_4675 5y agoSmall typo: Not everytime you have a brilliant idea, => Now everytime you have a brilliant idea,
- giarc 5y agoIt's actually not a typo, just an awkward sentence. I thought the same until I read it a few times.
- pxtail 5y agoThere is pretty well known static site generator https://hexo.io/ https://hexo.io/ At first I thought that name similarity indicates that you are using it somewhere as part of pipeline but apparently not.
- zffr 5y agoJust curious, how does the syntax highlighting work in the demo blog?
- lewisjoe 5y agoAh, I haven't mentioned it anywhere. You can also drop .md files in your "hexopress" folder in Google drive. These will show up as posts as well :) I use this to write posts that need code-blocks and also, I love markdown!
- zffr 5y agoNot sure if it would be possible, but I would love a way to do WYSIWYG code-block editing directly in google docs I tried the code-blocks google docs extension which looked right in my doc, but that didn't seem to work with hexopress
- tornupinside 5y agoVery cool, love writing docs in google, but find sharing it out somewhat lackluster. Couple q's 1. What sort of SEO is there/do you plan to add? 2. I onboarded through the product @rob, and then moved a doc to the hexopress folder in drive. How long does it take to refresh?
- lewisjoe 5y agoIt doesn’t refresh by itself. Once you finish writing your doc, you have to sign into hexopress once and click refresh blog once.
- zhvihti 5y agoUsers who have enabled Advanced Protection will not be able to use your service ("Error 400: policy_enforced"). Maybe add a note about that.
- BMorearty 5y agoVery nice. Recently I was thinking about doing this myself. Now I don’t have to! Yay procrastination.
- raybb 5y agoThis is pretty awesome! If anyone wants something similar but for documentation check this out: https://github.com/nytimes/library https://github.com/nytimes/library
- joshu 5y agoi have been hoping for this for a long time: http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/12/blogging-tools http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/12/blogging-tools
- RupertWiser 5y agoI've been using this approach for my blog and I've been loving it :) Seems like Google Docs for blogs is a bit of a golden ticket to the front page on hackernews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23134101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23134101). I'm a bit hesitant about using an external service for something like this however. I just have a cronjob running on the server I use for my website and that's worked out pretty well.
- jbluepolarbear 5y agoI use a google doc for my resume that I have on my website. I download the doc html from the embedded link in an Ajax call and then throw the result in the innerHTML of a div. https://jeremyrobertanderson.com/#resume https://jeremyrobertanderson.com/#resume
- fblp 5y agoI would pay for a hosted version and would love to donate to this in general.
- mayli 5y agoThis reminds me that google drive used to support hosting static site directly from a folder, as well as dropbox. Later all those online storage platforms dropped that feature.
- starik36 5y agoVery nice. Is there a built-in way to enable post comments?
- makethetick 5y agoIf you're interested in a wiki which works in a similar way then take a lot at https://youneedawiki.com/ https://youneedawiki.com/
- rahimnathwani 5y agoWe use YNAW. I was impressed with how easy it was to set up. It's simple enough for anyone to use. I saw another comment about a project that does a similar things, but is self-hosted and requires some more involved setup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145952 I'd love to know if anyone who has used both can comment on their experience after initial setup.
- WaffleIronMaker 5y agoI really like the large font on the main website. It could be considered a bit extreme, but it made it very easy to quickly understand the product
- flakiness 5y agoI hope Google Drive had a permission that allows access to only specific folders. There are many interesting tools built on top of GDocs and GDrive including this one, but giving the full access permission to GDrive is too scary to me. Even if the developers have no malicious intention (which I believe is most of the case), the possibility of data breach cannot be overlooked.
- lewisjoe 5y agoYes, Google has to fix this soon. I was bummed when I got know there is no way to restrict my scope to only the folder that I create on behalf of hexopress. There was no other way than to ask for more liberal scope. Hope Google breaks the drive scopes down to more fine-grained levels.
- JoshB-SMT 5y agoThis is just what I was looking for, thank you. I already started a blog with some skeleton markdown files that I made hoping to find a platform like this. http://hexo.press/@SMT/ http://hexo.press/@SMT/
- icon256 5y ago2 separate questions: How do I remove or edit individual posts? If I want to delete an account and blog, the option "Sign out" link - https://hexo.press/logout https://hexo.press/logout doesn't seem different from the actual "Delete Account and Blog". Am I missing something? Also, definitely should confirm a deletion of a blog page. Otherwise, great idea and implementation.