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Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

youdontneedwp.com

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Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

#11

Post by ggregoire »

CJefferson wrote: post #5
patwalls wrote: post #2

Hey HN, In my opinion, platforms like WordPress can feel bloated or be intimidating to new users. For this reason, I wanted to build a blogging platform on top of Google Docs. I actually run my own blog as a side project, and I use GDocs religiously because of its excellent collaboration and sharing features. When I’m collaborating with dozens of writers, it’s convenient to be able to use a product that everyone is f…

It looks like good fun, but I'll be honest I find the name very insulting. I've had a wordpress website for 8 years. Is this going to work in 8 years? 6 months?

The name is inspired from You Don’t Need jQuery, You don’t Need MomentJS and so on.

Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

#13

Post by rcach001 »

qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #10

But it's Google and right now we're mad at them. The most pleasurable set-up I do, for work and personal, is have a DO droplet hosting a bare-boned server, where static pages are served up, mostly text - because content is King, right?

Very mad. Also, I can't find anything easier to publish content than this aside from Medium.

Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

#14

Post by jmelloy »

WordPress isn't really targeted at single-user blogs for technical people... it's targeted at an environment where you can have multiple people writing blog posts and doing design without being programmers or mucking with the server. And it fits that need very well.

Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

#15

Post by scott_s »

patwalls wrote: post #2

Hey HN, In my opinion, platforms like WordPress can feel bloated or be intimidating to new users. For this reason, I wanted to build a blogging platform on top of Google Docs. I actually run my own blog as a side project, and I use GDocs religiously because of its excellent collaboration and sharing features. When I’m collaborating with dozens of writers, it’s convenient to be able to use a product that everyone is f…

It's not cool to grab someone else's blog posts to use as your demo.

Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

#16

Post by miguelmota »

You don't need Google Docs either. Seems like a terrible decision since Google is known for randomly shutting down services and updating their terms of use at any point. It's a nice proof of concept but I'd stick with WordPress or a static site generator

Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

#17

Post by jedimastert »

jmelloy wrote: post #14

WordPress isn't really targeted at single-user blogs for technical people... it's targeted at an environment where you can have multiple people writing blog posts and doing design without being programmers or mucking with the server. And it fits that need very well.

In a comment from the author[0], he mentions that one of the reasons for making the product was because he likes the collaboration features of Google Docs.

[0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18077455

Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

#18

Post by patwalls »

saberworks wrote: post #4
patwalls wrote: post #2

Hey HN, In my opinion, platforms like WordPress can feel bloated or be intimidating to new users. For this reason, I wanted to build a blogging platform on top of Google Docs. I actually run my own blog as a side project, and I use GDocs religiously because of its excellent collaboration and sharing features. When I’m collaborating with dozens of writers, it’s convenient to be able to use a product that everyone is f…

I really like this. I have a pretty big legacy site with one section full of user-contributed (HTML/images) tutorials written over a period of 20 years (yes, the site has been up over 20 years) and it'd be nice to just copy/paste them into something like google docs, tweak them a bit to make all the styles match, and then republish them. Your site says the project is open source, but I can't find any link. Will you s…

Sure! https://github.com/patwalls/ydnw

Contributions are very welcome!

Code is very hacky and I've been trying to manage making some changes between all the feedback I've gotten and my full time job.

Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

#20

Post by patwalls »

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #8
patwalls wrote: post #2

Hey HN, In my opinion, platforms like WordPress can feel bloated or be intimidating to new users. For this reason, I wanted to build a blogging platform on top of Google Docs. I actually run my own blog as a side project, and I use GDocs religiously because of its excellent collaboration and sharing features. When I’m collaborating with dozens of writers, it’s convenient to be able to use a product that everyone is f…

Very cool! I'm guessing that this relies on Google not breaking, disabling or rate-limiting their Docs API, correct?

Yes, very true. Important to think aboout.

There is a rate limit on their API although I don't think I will hit it at this point of the project, but I do plan to start thinking about how I can cache/save the export from the Google doc for pages that are getting hit really hard. Any ideas?

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