

Host webpages on Google Drive - HugoDias
https://googledrive.com/host/0B716ywBKT84AMXBENXlnYmJISlE/GoogleDriveHosting.html

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hkmurakami
I think this might be a pretty nice tool for people learning how to program
for the web, in that it's easy to share a link with friends for some quick
feedback.

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pazimzadeh
<http://www.site44.com/> does the same thing for Dropbox.

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RachelF
Syncdocs <http://syncdocs.com> lets you publish a website to Google Drive
right from your desktop. It also gives a much shorter goo.gl URL, and
automatically re-publishes changes.

However, Google Drive might has usage restrictions, so this is probably only
for low traffic sites.

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pringles
Sweet, now you can get your own URLs that are as ugly as Google+ ones.

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hnriot
That's a bit of a whiny comment! Use something else if you don't like the
Urls. Urls are less relevant these days anyway. Who types Urls anymore? Or who
even looks at them?

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pak
Who types URLs or looks at them? If you write URLs in an email, print them on
a business card, put them on a poster, say them in a conversation, or
basically need anybody who isn't already using a web browser to go to your
page, you type URLs _and_ look at them (or hear them). Hearing is the worst
offender.

\- Hey there, you should check out this really cool site/post/app/thing!

\- That sounds nice, where should I go?

\- You go to uh.. googledrive dot com slash host slash zero capital B ehh...
forget it.

There is a reason that facebook gave their users vanity URLs, and twitter user
URLs are so minimalist, and people pay millions for domain names. A shorter
URL is more useful and hence more valuable.

Having the option to point your own domain at the folder would be really nice,
actually, and put this on the same tier as Github Pages and S3.

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tkxxx7
You would never put a link like this on a business card or relay it in person
anyway. You'd probably just hyperlink some text on a blog or in an email. It's
pretty clear that this isn't a permanent web hosting solution.

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jpk
Nifty. Note, however, that if you want to use it to share javascript demos or
something, and you're on a google apps domain that forces https, you might hit
something similar to "[blocked] The page at <https://googledrive.com/whatever>
ran insecure content from <http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.min.js>. So
you'll have to include your own copy of jQuery or Require or whatever.

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jeff18
If you use Google's hosted libraries, you can embed it like so, and it should
seamlessly work over SSL.

<script
src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.0/jquery.min.js"></script>

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Benferhat
Same goes for cdnjs, jsdelivr, bootstrapcdn, etc.

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enyone
now it says: "There are currently too many people viewing this file. Please
try again later."

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dynaguy
#whois googledrive.com Registrant: Matt Serlin DNStination Inc. 303 Second
Street Suite 800 North San Francisco CA 94107 US admin@dnstinations.com
+1.4155319335 Fax: +1.4155319336

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packetslave
Note that the name servers are correct, though: ns{1-4}.google.com

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mixedbit
They serve user supplied JS from googledrive.com domain? Can it be done in a
secure way?

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adhipg
Dropbox also does that. You can potentially host your website within your
'Public' Dropbox folder.

I'm sure Google is not using <http://googledrive.com/> for anything that's
user-identifiable.

The only harm that I think can happen with JS is you being able to access/set
any cookies/storage that are set by another 'public' site hosted on Google
Drive that you've accessed earlier.

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mchanson
Dropbox shuts links down if you get any significant traffic.

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ollieglass
Really? Could you give more detail - at what level of traffic do they shut
down links?

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mchanson
<https://www.dropbox.com/help/45/en>

Looks like 20GB (free) or 200GB (paid) per day.

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qued
Seems like more than enough for simple sites shared with a bunch of people you
know. That is about 600 GBs of bandwidth a month, for free.

If you need more bandwidth, you would probably be looking at any of the other
innumerable hosting solutions available on the web.

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cgcardona
I can see this being extremely useful for someone just getting into web
development that needs a free place to host some stuff.

I recently started using Github as my blogging plaform. I just created a repo
called 'thoughts' which has a bunch of markdown files inside.

When I create a new 'post' I just share the link to the markdown file on
twitter/g+.

I can imagine someone using this feature in a similar way. A super
lightweight, quick, and easy way to share some content.

Sometimes just getting the content out is __far more important __than having a
nice website or url.

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SoftwareMaven
Right up until the underlying platform decides it needs a different model to
support its business needs.

It really seems like there should be a middle ground: my ideas get published
while ensuring your business survives. Right now, the two are independent
functions.

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aviswanathan
I've been waiting for this for a while. Although git is my preferred method of
working, for people who aren't technical and who just can't do stuff from
terminal, I think this is a great alternative.

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lukehorvat
The cool thing is you can still use Git with this approach. See:
[http://bigtrapeze.com/2012/08/25/using-google-drive-as-a-
git...](http://bigtrapeze.com/2012/08/25/using-google-drive-as-a-git-
repository/)

~~~
aviswanathan
Or you could just use Bitbucket haha

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bgertonson
My favorite part is that the page illustrates how it was created. Kind of a
"This is my life" story.

(the url in the image at the bottom is the url of the page itself)

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akurilin
Is the URL of that document pretty reliable or is it not really meant for the
long term? I'm thinking of whether there would be issues with using a custom
domain for it.

I currently host a static website from S3, and I still have to pay a couple of
bucks for the traffic. Sounds like this would be completely free.

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guptaneil
Check out GitHub Pages for hosting static content for free. I use it for all
my statically-generated sites now, and it's been great other than the couple
times GitHub went down.

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ripperdoc
So this implies that it would be delivered over Google CDN, e.g. from a
network close to requesting location?

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wyck
Sorry guys but I think GitHub/Bitbucket beat you to the punch, not to mention
all the PaaS apps out there.

Hosts more than css, html, js (for output)

Custom domains

Collaboration via revision control.

I see zero reason to ever use this when there are so many betters tools out
there .

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alaskamiller
Well, sometimes arrogance and being small minded does blind you to certain
things.

Like how if you're an office manager and you finally got used to using Docs
for word processing and spreadsheets but now wanted to make a webpage to send
out a message about the office party, this would be a good option.

Or if you're the outreach coordinator at your local church group and having
been using Gmail all the time to chat and setup group communication for awhile
this would be really easy for you to get started at making a webpage to talk
about the recent retreat.

Or if you're a high school student and you wanted to let people in your
neighborhood know that you're a go-getter that's capable of walking their
dogs, this would be a good option to make a webpage out of.

This is more for those that switched over from Microsoft Office world and it's
more of a direct competitor to grab use cases for Apple/iWeb.

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wyck
Your right I never though of end users just publishing docs straight to html,
I wasn't being arrogant, small minded probably.

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Xanza
Seems to be working fine, but I'd honestly never use it. It's pretty difficult
to do anything other than very simple HTML websites.

I had tried to upload my website template that I was working on that used
head.js (lazyloads javascript) and it was not working correctly.

>6/10

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ceautery
Is that an official Google page on how to do this, or a demo you put together
that Google may nix shortly? I ask mainly because a DS_Store file is visible
in the directory, which strikes me as not a typical Google thing. Do they even
use Mac OS for anything?

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milkbikis
Macs are quite popular at Google, actually

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indescription
There doesn't appear to be a way to edit the files, as the owner, after they
are uploaded.

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itsbits
i think Skydrive currently doesn't do that...they may not even have plans to
implement that..

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clumsybull
Is this sanctioned by Google?

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thisishugo
Yes[1] - it's an extension of an extant feature of Google Cloud Storage[2]

[1] <https://developers.google.com/drive/publish-site>

[2] [https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/website-
configura...](https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/website-
configuration)

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OGinparadise
This does not appear to be an official Google site or suggestion. Personally,
I'd use them for my cat's blog and that's about it. Google could pull the plug
on this at anytime

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steerpike
Seems pretty offficially supported in this blog post from Nov 2012
[http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/announcin...](http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/announcing-
google-drive-site-publishing.html)

and the associated drive SDK for publishing web content
<https://developers.google.com/drive/publish-site>

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hayksaakian
He probably means in the same way that iGoogle was officially supported.

In that if its unpopular or not to Google's expectation, they'll kill it all
of a sudden.

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anirugu
github work fine for me to host my static html,css,js pages.

