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Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

site44.com

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Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#41

Post by logn »

WrkInProgress wrote: post #36
Shenglong wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

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.

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.

Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#43

Post by smarx »

andrewfelix wrote: post #18

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

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).

Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#45

Post by 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!

Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#46

Post by smarx »

piokuc wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#48

Post by 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.

Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#49

Post by smarx »

kissrdotco wrote: post #45

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!

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.

Re: Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

#50

Post by smarx »

biturd wrote: post #48

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 a…

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.)

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