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Dropbox-Hosted Websites

brace.io

11–20 of 66 posts

Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites

#15
post #13

So, it saves you the extra click to upload via SFTP? I really am not sure I get the point. Are they targeting people who are confused and befuddled by normal file synchronization?

ie: the majority of computer users?

Seriously: the only reason Dropbox exists and is wildly successful is that "normal file synchronization" is such a pain, even for us hackers, let alone mere mortals.

There's a reason that you see Dropbox peeking out of the system tray of so many business professionals and other non-techies. Why not piggyback off that success?

Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites

#17

So, it saves you the extra click to upload via SFTP? I really am not sure I get the point. Are they targeting people who are confused and befuddled by normal file synchronization?

That's not very convenient, even for power users. My blog runs on a custom CMS I wrote, yet it was enough of a pain that I eventually added Dropbox integration. This setup has the added advantage that all the state is always in Dropbox, backed up, and I can set up as many read-only mirrors that autosync as I want:

http://www.stavros.io/posts/this-blog-is-dropbox-enabled/

http://mirror.stavros.io/posts/this-blog-is-dropbox-enabled/

Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites

#18
post #12

The value add on this doesn't seem very high... it can be useful in limited circumstances.

I agree.

Scenarios where you need extremely simplified website access are unlikely to be those where you need well distributed hosting.

Re: Dropbox-Hosted Websites

#20
post #6
post #4

The demo video talks about files being copied to a 'network of servers' to provide load balancing, so does this tool really produce 'Dropbox hosted' websites, or does it just use Dropbox as a mechanism for transferring files between the user and what amounts to a web host? If it's the latter, why even bother with Dropbox as a middle man?

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 cloud platforms work.

Need collaboration or external contributors? Just invite your friends on Dropbox!

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