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

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

#41

Post by levythe »

smacktoward wrote: post #36
miguelmota wrote: post #16

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

Most static site generators require authors to learn something like Markdown in order to publish, which is a much bigger hurdle for non-technical people than technical people generally appreciate. Google Docs at least provides a WYSIWYG-ish interface many people will already be familiar with, and those that aren't won't find as forbidding.

I never thought I would hear someone call markdown a hurdle to adoption. Maybe I'm more semantically minded, but I have yet to find a markup syntax easier to figure out than markdown, including the rich text editors in Google Docs.

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

#42

Post by cremp »

aorth wrote: post #27

I want to own my own content, servers, domains, etc... it's not even about Google specifically being evil—we gotta stop outsourcing stuff to people providing it to us for "free."

For me, it's all about knowing, and owning the stack.

If something breaks, I know its my fault, and using the knowledge gained by setting it up, I should have a pretty good idea where to start.

Never stop learning.

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

#43

Post by jermaustin1 »

mort96 wrote: post #38
pavel_lishin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Docs is probably _reasonably_ safe; it's used by a lot of Google's business users, and has no clear internal competitor anxious to murder it. (As far as I know, anyway.) I'd say that Docs is as safe as YouTube or Gmail. Sure, you might get locked out of your account with no recourse, but the offering itself isn't likely to go away.

I thought Inbox was reasonably safe. After all, it's part of their e-mail offering, right?

Inbox was kind of an experiment and competition with their main GMail offering. It had resources that ABC probably felt could be used elsewhere, so they took what were probably the most used features from it, merged it back into GMail and killed it.

Docs doesn't have anything in their current product line that they can do the same to, they might merge another product INTO Docs and kill that product, but never Docs itself.

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

#44

Post by chungy »

levythe wrote: post #41
smacktoward wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most static site generators require authors to learn something like Markdown in order to publish, which is a much bigger hurdle for non-technical people than technical people generally appreciate. Google Docs at least provides a WYSIWYG-ish interface many people will already be familiar with, and those that aren't won't find as forbidding.

I never thought I would hear someone call markdown a hurdle to adoption. Maybe I'm more semantically minded, but I have yet to find a markup syntax easier to figure out than markdown, including the rich text editors in Google Docs.

There are much more intuitive markup languages than Markdown, like AsciiDoc and Org-Mode. Plus Markdown's issue with multiple incompatible implementations...

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

#45

Post by ronaldl93 »

Bekwnn wrote: post #35
miguelmota wrote: post #16

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

Setting a site up with Jekyll took less than a weekend, and I'm a C++/games programmer with next to zero web experience. If you want a blog I don't know why you would go with anything but starting with a static site generator and building on top of that.

You're still a C++ developer... A normal mom/dad who simply wants to share his/her latest cookie recipe isn't gonna want to deal with Jekyll.

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

#46

Post by CharlesW »

sparrish wrote: post #25
loosescrews wrote: post #19

Or you could use the new Google Sites which has a lot of the same features and benefits. https://sites.google.com/

Google sites has been around since 2008. Hardly new.

The completely different Google Sites that OP is referring to was released less than six months ago.

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

#47

Post by dwalkr »

smacktoward wrote: post #36
miguelmota wrote: post #16

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

Most static site generators require authors to learn something like Markdown in order to publish, which is a much bigger hurdle for non-technical people than technical people generally appreciate. Google Docs at least provides a WYSIWYG-ish interface many people will already be familiar with, and those that aren't won't find as forbidding.

I definitely think static sites are a great alternative to WP, and I love Markdown. But you're right: trying to get non-developer users to write markdown was a struggle, they thought it was some new special language we were forcing down their throat.

I work for https://forestry.io/ and we created a CMS for static sites that lets users write markdown with a WYSIWYG editor, and allows devs to build an interface for editing front matter.

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

#48

Post by smacktoward »

levythe wrote: post #41
smacktoward wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most static site generators require authors to learn something like Markdown in order to publish, which is a much bigger hurdle for non-technical people than technical people generally appreciate. Google Docs at least provides a WYSIWYG-ish interface many people will already be familiar with, and those that aren't won't find as forbidding.

I never thought I would hear someone call markdown a hurdle to adoption. Maybe I'm more semantically minded, but I have yet to find a markup syntax easier to figure out than markdown, including the rich text editors in Google Docs.

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that non-technical people see these things completely differently than technical people do. Seen through the eyes of technical people like your average HN reader, Markdown is simple and lightweight. Seen through the eyes of a non-technical person, marking up text in any format (not just Markdown) looks indistinguishable from writing code, which is something they believe deep down is way over their heads. The pushback you will get from them if you try to force them to do it anyway is typically epic. They will fight against it every step of the way.

It's not impossible to get regular people to mark up text; WordPerfect did so very effectively for many years. But it's worth remembering that (1) that was in the 1980s, when people put up with having to learn things they didn't want to because the technology wasn't advanced enough to offer them an alternative, and (2) eventually the technology did advance, and Microsoft Word came along with its WYSIWYG interface and promptly put WordPerfect into a hole in the desert.

It's also not impossible to write a static CMS that provides a normie-friendly WYSIWYG interface, rather than having everything revolve around editing text files. That's what Movable Type (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type) was, for instance, a set of Perl scripts that provided a friendly WYSIWYG interface over content stored in a database, and then ground out static pages from that content whenever it changed. But modern SSGs are pitched to developers first and foremost, so they all revolve around stuff like Markdown and Git that are about as approachable to non-technical people as garlic is to Dracula.

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

#49

Post by patwalls »

smacktoward wrote: post #48
levythe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought I would hear someone call markdown a hurdle to adoption. Maybe I'm more semantically minded, but I have yet to find a markup syntax easier to figure out than markdown, including the rich text editors in Google Docs.

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that non-technical people see these things completely differently than technical people do. Seen through the eyes of technical people like your average HN reader, Markdown is simple and lightweight. Seen through the eyes of a non-technical person, marking up text in any format (not just Markdown) looks indistinguishable from writing code , which is something they believe deep d…

This.

For my blog that I mentioned in my top comment, I use Google Docs because I'm working with people that usually don't know Markdown (I'm interviewing e-commerce business owners).

I need it to be as easy as possible for them to get the written interview done. From my experience, a Google doc is the easiest way to do this, and it allows for very familiar features when I ask them for edits or provide feedback in-document.

Basically, I'm trying to make as little friction as possible to getting the document complete.

This is just my experience.

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

#50

Post by furi »

smacktoward wrote: post #48
levythe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought I would hear someone call markdown a hurdle to adoption. Maybe I'm more semantically minded, but I have yet to find a markup syntax easier to figure out than markdown, including the rich text editors in Google Docs.

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that non-technical people see these things completely differently than technical people do. Seen through the eyes of technical people like your average HN reader, Markdown is simple and lightweight. Seen through the eyes of a non-technical person, marking up text in any format (not just Markdown) looks indistinguishable from writing code , which is something they believe deep d…

Normally I would agree but Markdown-esque text annotation has been a feature of many commonly used platforms for years now. A quick search plus my own knowledge tells me the following platforms support it: Facebook Messenger, Skype, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram and Reddit posts. It looks like LINE, Viber and Kik Messenger don't support it, but those are the only major ones that don't seem to.
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