How is this different than backlift - https://www.backlift.com is already doing the same thing.
Dropbox-Hosted Websites
41–50 of 66 posts
Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone put a simple UI in front of github pages, I think they'd have a winner...
It's been something like 2 years of me saying that. I even considered starting my own github competitor just do have this single feature as a difference... but somehow I feel it wouldn't be enough for people to switch.
I don't think you could get people to switch. But if you build a familiar UI, that publishes to github, I'd use it.
Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites
#43Not sure what the advantage of this is.
I guess just simplicity and easy DNS setup?
Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like the main use of Dropbox is just as a mechanism to upload to their service. To be fair, this is a lot easier for an end user to deal with than something like FTP, SFTP, and especially git.
This. Nothing is more easier than just drag n' drop few files into a folder. There are tons of static-generators in Ruby/Python/Nodejs/whatever, but none has the simplicity of Dropbox publishing. Think of it, dropbox as a versioned storage for Markdown source files, third party platform to publish full-fledged rendered HTML with analytics, sitemap, feeds, mobile views, pdf/json/xml formats, etc. This is how should cl…
In theory, gvfs with FTP is that convenient. The problem is that it's a little, shall we say... "quirky".
Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites
#45So there are a handful of other services doing this same basic concept (see other comment), and none of them seem to have a story about how this scales past a single developer: sure, you can share the Dropbox folder and all work in the same place, but on something like a website with common CSS files and other centralized assets it seems like that would rapidly become unmanageable.
I think the market for these types of services is not multi-person dev teams. Instead, this is for your solo freelancer who doesn't want to deal with the hassle of hosting and where git is overkill.
Shameless plug: Solving high-quality web site production (for a multi-person dev team, including non-developer personas such as designers, content writers, reviewers, translators, etc.) is actually part of a new project I'm working on (http://grow.io). If you (or any other reader) has an immediate need for this type of product/app, I'd love to talk to you to learn more about your requirements (and share more about my project).
Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites
#46I'm totally confused (once again something on HN makes me feel like an idiot). Doesn't Dropbox already give everyone free hosting? Dropbox has been hosting my website, on their dime, for quite a while already ( http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41075/brentnoorda/index.h... ). So, um... What?
Presumably this service serves the site at the root of your own domain, rather than on an untypeable Dropbox URL.
Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites
#47I'm totally confused (once again something on HN makes me feel like an idiot). Doesn't Dropbox already give everyone free hosting? Dropbox has been hosting my website, on their dime, for quite a while already ( http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41075/brentnoorda/index.h... ). So, um... What?
Just a quick heads up using Dropbox as web hosting - Google and the rest won't ever index your site as the domain has a deny-all robots.txt
Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites
#48How is this different than backlift - https://www.backlift.com is already doing the same thing.
How does it feel realizing it's the same service?
Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites
#49How is this different than backlift - https://www.backlift.com is already doing the same thing.
Or TinySite (https://github.com/niko/TinySite). (Shameless plug). Ok. TinySite will separate designer and editor roles. Editors will edit Textile document.
Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. Nothing is more easier than just drag n' drop few files into a folder. There are tons of static-generators in Ruby/Python/Nodejs/whatever, but none has the simplicity of Dropbox publishing. Think of it, dropbox as a versioned storage for Markdown source files, third party platform to publish full-fledged rendered HTML with analytics, sitemap, feeds, mobile views, pdf/json/xml formats, etc. This is how should cl…
In theory, gvfs with FTP is that convenient. The problem is that it's a little, shall we say... "quirky".
You can't gvfs in iOS/Android/Windows/OS X
And FTP port is not as ubiquitous as 80/443
Your FTP server availability is always worse than Dropbox's EC2 cloud.
FTP has account/mask/chmod/filename encoding problems
You have to backup your data on server and resolve file name conflicts in some odd way.
The list goes on.