I was super excited by this because I do most of my writing in Google docs. But then I realized how much other information is in my Google docs! What are the privacy implications of signing up? If this project happened to be taken over by an evil villian, could they snoop my docs?
Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs
61–70 of 114 posts
Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right, my comment is more directed at people who are somewhat tech savy and a response to the parent's comment about static site generators. I'm echoing and advocating how easy they are.
And the comment is directed at people reading hacker news, so a majority are probably tech savy enough to glue together some CSS, small html templates, and markdown.
Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs
#63Earlier 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…
I hated WordPerfect for this reason at the time. I was a fan of Word for DOS long before Microsoft had the dominance it would come to have. And I say this as someone who did quite a bit of coding at the time (and used lots of different word processors).
Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs
#64I don't know why this is attracting so much hate here. It's a novel and useful idea. Sure, you're relying on Docs, but that's an established, mainline Google service which makes them money through their enterprise work stack (so I doubt it'll get Google Reader'd). If you were using Google's cloud, nobody in the comments would know or care. Sometimes HN is just negative for the sake of being negative. I think this is…
Thanks! That's a good point.
People might crap on your idea because it relies on a Google product, but massive companies like Snapchat and Airbnb use Google Cloud.
Obviously GDocs are a bit different but lots of businesses are built on top of Google products (e.g. Google Maps)
Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs
#65I think this is pretty cool. I know more than one person who loves google docs and hates wordpress whom I will be forwarding this to.
Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs
#66Hey 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?
I guess you're not going to like my side project:
You Don't Need To Be Insulted By You Don't Need WordPress.
Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs
#67Hey 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.
I also thought that was strange. Took me a minute to realise that he wasn't the author.
Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs
#68I don't know why this is attracting so much hate here. It's a novel and useful idea. Sure, you're relying on Docs, but that's an established, mainline Google service which makes them money through their enterprise work stack (so I doubt it'll get Google Reader'd). If you were using Google's cloud, nobody in the comments would know or care. Sometimes HN is just negative for the sake of being negative. I think this is…
Bollocks.
Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Markdown is supported, but is it required? I know lots of Messenger and Skype users that have never heard of Markdown.
Perhaps an embarrassing case in point I have been a developer, sysadmin, infra architect, and generally in IT industry for couple of decades. I am not professional but dabble in HTML/CSS/JS. Certainly use social media.
And every now and then think to myself "I should check what this 'markdown' thing is" :P
Checking it now, I can absolutely agree that 100% of my non-developer friends will believe it is code and beyond them [both untrue as facts but true as perceptions]. And trying to persuade them otherwise will only convince them further how much out of touch with "the real world" I am :D
Re: Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs
#70I did something similar back in 2013-2014 for the initial Makers UPV blog[1], which was much later migrated to Ghost.
The underlying technology we used is drive-db[2], a library I made to use a spreadsheet as the database. Then just used an obscure-ish Google docs API to retrieve each article content. When you wanted to publish an article, you had to create the doc, publish to the web and copy the link to the spreadsheet.
This looks like a very well put together product of the hacky solution I did back in the day, so kudos!
Edit: the best feature of this is that several people can collaborate in real time on an article! Something that Wordpress doesn't have and was used a lot for us in the beginning.