
My blog is now generated by Google Docs - RupertWiser
https://benwiser.com/blog/My-blog-is-now-generated-by-Google-Docs.html
======
ForrestN
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.

~~~
leesalminen
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!

~~~
shrikant
You mean your app's release notes go beyond just "\- Bug fixes and misc.
enhancements"? Good on you!

(Sorry for the seemingly drive-by, this really annoys me in Play Store update
release notes!)

~~~
leesalminen
Oh yes. We used to be lazy developers and do the bare minimum. We sell a SaaS
to the SMB field and the feedback we got was that they wanted to know
_exactly_ what we were changing in the app. So now we produce full sentence
(or paragraph) explanations for every JIRA card that gets into production for
our users, including links to updated documentation, training videos,
screenshots, etc.

------
ipsum2
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.

</span></p><p style="padding:0;margin:0;color:#000000;font-size:11pt;font-
family:&quot;Arial&quot;;line-height:1.15;orphans:2;widows:2;height:11pt;text-
align:left"><span style="color:#000000;font-weight:400;text-
decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:11pt;font-
family:&quot;Arial&quot;;font-style:normal"></span></p><p
style="padding:0;margin:0;color:#000000;font-size:11pt;font-
family:&quot;Arial&quot;;line-height:1.15;orphans:2;widows:2;text-
align:left"><span style="color:#000000;font-weight:400;text-
decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:11pt;font-
family:&quot;Arial&quot;;font-style:normal">

~~~
marvinblum
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
Use “Show HN” to show case it :-)

~~~
marvinblum
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)

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

~~~
fireattack
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
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.

~~~
richardARPANET
Time is money and this saves a tonne of it. You're free to code everything
yourself and save that tiny amount of money of course if you like. Different
people have different priorities.

------
avivo
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
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
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
Thanks for the feedback!

Yes - dealing with access to a users entire drive is something we are looking
at to try and get working for exactly that reason - the words `this app can
delete all your files` is scary :-)

There isn't an option to remove the footer but should be +1 added to backlog -
thanks again!

------
ignoramous
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
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/)

------
mikeryan
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
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-pa...](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/02/looking-forward-into-
the-past/) ).

~~~
gibolt
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
This is why browsers are working to remove user-agent and referer. Almost all
real world use is tracking and nonsensical blocks.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I was familiar with removing user-agent work, but what's this about removing
referrer? Can you give a link?

~~~
Polylactic_acid
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...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-data-leaks-
by-stripping-path-information-in-http-referrers/)

------
elondaits
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.

~~~
mettamage
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
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
Ah, fair enough. I totally forgot that reason, haha.

------
1wheel
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
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/)

------
lkc9
This isn't directly related to the post but the root of this website is
hilarious: [https://benwiser.com/](https://benwiser.com/)

~~~
miguelmota
On mobile I just see a broken static image of the person's head.

~~~
devbat8712
Tilt your phone.

------
krm01
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
FAQ not expanding.

Console errors: Blocked loading mixed active content
“[http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.mi...](http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js”)
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.mi...](http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js”)
upstart.me Loading failed for the <script> with source
“[http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.mi...](http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js”).
upstart.me:179:1 ReferenceError: $ is not defined

~~~
judge2020
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
mixed active content was why the browser blocked it. the cdnjs link is http,
while the site is https.

------
sequoia
> 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-
gene...](https://sequoia.makes.software/lets-code-it-static-site-generator/)

------
magicalhippo
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
is there any benefit of that over the built-in html export function (which
also works terribly)?

~~~
magicalhippo
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 :)

------
marvinblum
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)

------
WheelsAtLarge
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.

------
patwalls
I built an app that lets you create a blog from Google docs.

[https://youdontneedwp.com](https://youdontneedwp.com)

~~~
serf
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?

------
city41
This website: [https://www.fgbg.art/](https://www.fgbg.art/), is powered by
this spreadsheet:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W8RE885PVF2z3L9KU9LS...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W8RE885PVF2z3L9KU9LSCS3y5mpAMldAuoEfcuCcLms)

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
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
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-
sheet...](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-google-sheets/)

------
soared
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
I use Blot as well and have been very pleased with it.

------
throwawaysea
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?

------
Traster
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
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
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
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
Does sapper work without JS too? I thought svelte was a JS library?

~~~
Tade0
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.

------
el_programmador
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
At least with takeout I know I have regular backups.

That's more than most places offer.

~~~
tmpz22
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".

~~~
adrianmsmith
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.

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

~~~
stOneskull
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?

------
obeattie
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
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.

------
hawski
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/)

------
iisthesloth
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
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
Great idea. I will certainly look into that. Thanks!

------
franciscop
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.

------
uniqo
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!

------
janjanson
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.

------
xueyongg
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-
sec...](https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-02-29-articles-in-second-half-
of-feb)

------
tbstbstbs
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” :-)

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

------
z3t4
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.

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xnxn
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/)

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factorialboy
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?

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volkandkaya
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.

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binocarlos
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
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
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!

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andy_ppp
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).

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K0SM0S
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
I personally like Pelican as a static blog generator that parses Markdown
content.

[https://blog.getpelican.com/](https://blog.getpelican.com/)

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londons_explore
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
As a reader, i don't want to be anywhere near somebody's half-finished first
draft.

different personalities, I suppose.

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

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madsohm
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.

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syntaxing
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.

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donohoe
Check out ArchieML which the NYTimes built for when they use Google Docs for
publishing

[http://archieml.org/](http://archieml.org/)

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nicexe
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?

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

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

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bawana
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.

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JSavageOne
And this is your only blog post?

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lihaciudaniel
>wordpress (I really don’t like wordpress).

I really don't like your blog

