
Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites - songzme
https://www.site44.com/
======
biturd
I give site44 a few weeks before they have to stop. DropBox, unless they have
changed in the last ~6 months, won't let you do this. I'm not sure if it's in
their TOS anymore since they went through the whole TOS fiasco a while back,
but I've tried this and been shut down.

I'm not known on the Internet at all. I have perhaps 30 friends in Facebook. I
had a Wordpress blog and grabbed an image I had sitting in DropBox and used
it's public URL. I posted a link on Facebook. Within an hour Dropbox had
detected "unusual" activity and disabled the image.

Further, I've tried sharing a 700MB movie ( personal project I self edited )
to a small group of friends. I sent an email to 5 people, so there were 5 or
less downloads. The movie was disabled for too much bandwidth use.

I do only have the free Dropbox account, and in the past have linked to a
small jpg and posted that to a mailing list for css so it was probably hit
thousands of times and that was allowed to stay.

I'm not sure what their internal system is set for as to rules for xfer
amounts and number of hits, but in my experience, it's pretty low.

A novel idea, though I would think anyone who knows how to make an HTML site
is already locally previewing it, so they would already know how to put it in
their public folder. Having a custom domain name point to it is nice. Is
site44 proxying the requests? Most isp's don't like this sort of thing either.
Any significant traffic outbound on 80 might set off some bells.

I do think it's good to try. The more that use it the more it may send a
message to our isp's to stop having so many silly rules. And maybe DropBox
will lighten up on theirs.

Is the OP link served from DropBox? I'll bet it isn't.

~~~
smarx
Hi, I'm one of Site44's founders.

We've been running for about six months now and have thousands of users, and
Dropbox has helped us with our API use since the beginning. Yes, the OP
(www.site44.com) is hosted on Site44.

Here's a guest post on the Dropbox developer blog about how we use their API:
<https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/23>

Perhaps your confusion is that you assume we're using Dropbox public folders
or that Dropbox is hosting the content in some way. This isn't true. (We're
serving all the content ourselves and only need to talk to Dropbox to get
files that change.)

~~~
biturd
Yep, my bad, I didn't notice you were sucking the site up and hosting it
yourself, I thought you found a crafty way to service dropbox through the OS
over the users local port. My mistake.

Great idea and good luck.

------
andrewfelix
Any examples anyone can show? I'd be interested to see how these pages
perform.

~~~
smarx
www.site44.com itself is hosted on Site44. My blog is too
(<http://blog.smarx.com>).

Be careful when testing performance... browser refreshes trigger us going back
to Dropbox to look for changes to files, so they're considerably slower than
just navigating around a site (where we typically serve pages from an in-
memory cache).

EDIT: Forgot to mention I'm one of the founders of Planet Rational (the
company that made this).

~~~
simonw
Are you using the /delta API? <https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/15>

~~~
smarx
Yes. See our guest post on that same blog:
<https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/23>

------
josh_blum
Similar service but allows you to have dynamic pages

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025901>

------
ImJasonH
Google Drive recently announced a feature similar to this:
[http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/11/announcing-g...](http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/11/announcing-
google-drive-site-publishing.html)

------
RDDavies
Cool idea. Homepage needs tweaked for iPad. Content pushed to absolute edges
with 0 margin.

~~~
smarx
Thanks. We'll take a look.

~~~
RDDavies
I've found this exact problem before with Bootstrap. I solved it, but it was
perhaps 6mo ago and don't remember, otherwise I'd take care of it for you.

Congrats again on shipping a kick-ass product.

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sjmulder
I used to work with a guy who built something similar: <http://droppages.com/>

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome

        -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
    

This CSS rule in that site is the worst kind of CSS rule; one that disables
basic browser functionality.

~~~
abhidilliwal
I wonder, why webkit made this in first place!

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kissrdotco
I created a similar service last winter: <http://www.kissr.com/>.

A friend of mine talked to Drew Houston about the idea at a conference and
Housten loved it!

1124 people have signed up for KISSr but I have yet to get anyone to pay for
it.

I have since lost interest in the project.

I still think it is a great idea and I am glad someone is running with it!

~~~
smarx
Hi. I'm one of Site44's founders. If you're no longer working on KISSr, do you
want to suggest to users that they migrate over to Site44? Ping me if you want
to chat: smarx@site44.com.

~~~
jbackus
Heh, this comment reminds me of exactly what Dale Carnegie recommends NOT to
do when reaching out to another party.[1]

If you're actually interested in making this happen I'd recommend you reach
out to him privately and _at least_ provide an incentive for him to help you
out.

1\. [http://books.google.com/books?id=1rW-
QpIAs8UC&pg=PA38](http://books.google.com/books?id=1rW-QpIAs8UC&pg=PA38)

------
darren
<https://harp.io/> is doing something similar as well.

------
guylhem
Something I have been doing at home since I got my hand on the command line
client - but the idea to commercialize the package is just great !

Hosting has become a commodity - but you can sell ease of use - especially if
publishing a website is a dropbox drag'n drop away.

------
cyberpanther
You can do this now with Google Drive and the Neutron Drive app:
<https://neutron-drive.appspot.com/>

~~~
shannonbailey78
Awesome!

------
tonydewan
<http://paperplane.io> is a similar service that I've been working on.

~~~
zopticity
Another remake: <http://pancake.io/>

~~~
dps
For those without time to check them out... paperplane.io is pretty much
exactly the same as site44 except it's $9/mth. pancake.io is a little
different - seems to be aimed at hosting markdown formatted files and allowing
you to either link directly to them or embed a little widget on another site
linking to the files you have hosted on dropbox (sorted by most recently
edited etc)

------
pkorzeniewski
I love it! Works like charm for small projects, for example I've built a
simple private app that is both hosted on Dropbox (thru Site44) and uses
Dropbox as DB (thru API), so everything is in one "box" which makes working on
it really pleasant :)

------
arikrak
I had been looking for something like that for a web host chart I was making,
but someone on HN pointed it out to me:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4846110>

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WrkInProgress
Maybe I just don't get it, but who is the target audience for something like
this ?

~~~
Shenglong
It'd be very useful for laypeople. No FTP, no SSH, no SCP... You just drag and
drop - I can definitely see it taking off.

Actually, I think I'll be using it too for _shenglong.ca_ where I keep a bunch
of static content. Lots of people have domains, but don't really pay for any
servers during project down times (blasphemy, I know!)

~~~
WrkInProgress
But these same lay people are going to create html and css files ?

I'm not trying to obtuse but I'm having a hard time seeing the value
proposition of something like this.

~~~
logn
Maybe these lay people pay a few hundred dollars to a freelancer for a simple
website and don't know a good hosting option. E.g., I just designed a very
simple, 3-page static site for a roofing company.

------
anandkulkarni
Doesn't Dropbox impose transfer limits? I've seen public items hosted in
Dropbox become popular and then quietly inaccessible as more people tried to
reach them.

Perhaps that's not the use case that's intended here?

~~~
idunno246
I'd assume it's getting sync'd to a webserver, so dropbox isnt public

~~~
johns
Exactly. Site44 only uses Dropbox for the sync, then serves out the site over
its own infrastructure.

~~~
epa
Very interesting idea! This is really smart and handy for small business or
blogs. I wonder what Dropbox thinks of this idea.. maybe they should
incorporate it into their own service?

~~~
smarx
Hi, I'm one of Site44's founders. Dropbox has been quite supportive in helping
us to use their API. If you're curious how we interact with Dropbox, read our
guest post on their developer blog:
<https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/23>.

------
schrodinger
Sounds very useful, but can't you just put pages in your public folder?

~~~
c0m4
The public folders are going away

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xxpor
Has anyone made a generic Dropbox<->S3 bucket sync client yet?

~~~
ew
Yes. We created Backup Box back in March to solve this problem.
<https://mybackupbox.com>

We have also released our technology as an API at <http://mover.io>

Feedback is welcome!

~~~
TheTaytay
Mover.io looks like a great idea. I've been fiddling about with S3 and FTP
wrappers, so this looks helpful. I'm looking forward to my API key.

------
piokuc
Nice. I haven't even checked advanced features links, but I imagine it
wouldn't be difficult to copy the files to a more suitable cloud storage if
dropbox transfer limits become an issue.

~~~
smarx
Yes. We do some stuff that's not as easy to copy (like custom mime types and
redirects), but certainly the goal is that you can easily just copy the files
elsewhere.

------
ende42
<http://tinysite.heroku.com/> will do s/th similar. Hosted on free Heroku
plans.

------
mceoin
Guys, just want to say thanks. This site is awesome. Exactly what I was
looking for when I woke up this morning.

~~~
smarx
Thanks! (I'm one of the founders.)

------
frozenport
How do you make a website that is 100% client side? Where is the SQL, PHP? I
am not sure I know who this for...

~~~
kreutz
There are static sites all over the web that have no SQL or PHP or anything
like that (<http://shows-app.com/>, <http://www.usefabric.com/>). Static site
generators like jekyll could use something like this. Splash pages for
startups and apps could also use this.

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milep
You should have a clear link to pricing in the front page. Now it's hidden
behind "learn more".

------
roy_x
I have been using Dropbox to store my utility html/js pages for a long time
already....

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deadairspace
I would probably use this if PHP were enabled.

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taylorhou
this is effing amazing. it's site control for dumbasses with a simple yet
familiar interface of dropbox. #LOVE IT

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msturm
<http://get.drapache.com/> does the same thing. yaawn.

------
abhidilliwal
but.. it just allow static content, good to make it a CDN :D

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taskstrike
This is already possible through the public folder function on Dropbox.

You can still turn it on in Dropbox if you don't have it.

~~~
kingsley_20
Public folders don't work consistently in countries that Dropbox has deemed a
piracy risk. Doesn't work in India, for example.

