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Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages

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Re: Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages

#71

Post by hanniabu »

tjchear wrote: post #47
anderspitman wrote: post #17

Services like this need an easy way to allow people to use their own domain names, and we need to lower the barrier of entry to individuals registering domains and setting up HTTPS. Imagine a SaaS that sells domains, then provides and easy (and open) API for delegating control over subdomains using OAuth2. So I sign up for sheetui, and during the registration process they redirect me to a namecheap.com (where andersp…

This is an interesting use case (the delegation of subdomain). Sounds like something that can be built atop Amazon Route 53. Have you seen this need come up a lot?

Personally I would love the ability to show data on my website using a Google sheet where others less technical can contribute to (open source projects) as opposed to editing json files. It would only make sense for me to do it if it's still hosted under my domain though.

Re: Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages

#72

Post by Shermanium »

tjchear wrote: post #18

FYI to folks who are trying it out now - on step 3, you'll have to click on an element on the preview UI so you could customize it. You can customize it to show a particular column by clicking the + button. Without customization, the resulting page will not show anything. I'll fix this in the next iteration by providing defaults.

thanks - emailing you about my project!

Re: Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages

#74

Post by tjchear »

rnotaro wrote: post #70

Anyone have a end-result demo page that I can look at? I would like to see what it looks like.

Pardon the long links, this is something I'll address in the next iteration.

Product Catalog: https://sheetui.com/view/grid/image-tile/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT-Sin...

Pokemons: https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media-card-2/1F92PX...

Team roster: https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media-card-2/1F92PX...

Re: Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages

#75

Post by tjchear »

vijaybritto wrote: post #67
tjchear wrote: post #2

So from talking to people I see a need to quickly turn a spreadsheet of information into something visually pleasing. SheetUI is my response to that need. You give it a Google Sheet URL, pick a template, and tap in the columns where you want them to show up. In return you get a visually pleasing and responsive web page that you can embed on your site, or link to in your newsletter or chat with a client. Created with…

Massive kudos to the effort. The Gsheets API is notoriously hard to understand and work with. I see that you have put it to good use! Great work!

Thank you! I have yet to use the Cloud GSheets API; there's a much simpler approach, but it requires the user to publish their sheet on the web. I'm definitely working on GSheets API integration so users would not have to publish their sheet though.

Re: Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages

#76

Post by vertex-four »

anderspitman wrote: post #64
vertex-four wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha oh wow, I had a design document for this last year, down to the details. OAuth2 doesn't quite fit the bill without a little modification, unfortunately.

Would love to discuss it. I think this could be a solid business. I have little interest in building it myself, but may have to in order to make my other projects easier to self-host. I keep bringing it up hoping to find out it already exists. What issues did you run into with OAuth2? Are you open to sharing your design doc?

If you want to contact me, I'm shell@alterednarrative.net on email and XMPP. I'll try and find whether I still have the design notes, but doubt it; I've been through a couple of laptops since and lost a lot.

One of my goals was that the flow could start from a service provider - you type in the domain name you want the service to be bound to on the service provider's website, and it goes from there. If you were to use OAuth2 at this point, there's no existing client ID/password, and allowing public dynamic client registration leads to DoS potential as someone could easily register a practically infinite amount of clients and fill up disk space. So you want a custom flow which winds up, at the end, with the consent of the domain owner, returning OAuth2 credentials to the service provider. This flow is fairly complex to spec out in a way that doesn't have subtle security issues (e.g. this initial flow can't trust much info from the service provider which could be something akin to a phishing scam, returning to the service provider on error has to be done carefully because of risk of being used in an open redirect chain, etc).

After that it's mostly a case of supplying auth keys for RFC2136 so the service can manage its delegated domain, handling credential rotation, and properly handling edge cases like either the service provider or the domain management system losing track of state, or the domain being lost/transferred to another entity.

Honestly I'd like to build something like this for my own projects, and might do so as a weekend project soon, esp since it's just been validated as something useful. :D

Re: Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages

#78

Post by tjchear »

contravariant wrote: post #66
londons_explore wrote: post #37

This product is great... But it makes me feel sad to think about all the webpages that hide a small amount of tabular data in an oversized web UI. I want the reverse of this service - I just want the raw data from any web page in a spreadsheet ready to filter and sort and define new columns as I please...

This is one of the reasons I really like that some webpages have taken to using JSON REST endpoints to provide the data for their (usually React-based) webpage. It makes it fantastically easy to circumvent all the complicated stuff and just directly access the data. It's somewhat of a shame that HTML never quite managed to split data from representation. It managed to separate content and styling, but the content is…

Like it or not, it's the reality we're in. It's not going away anytime soon, but we can always achieve incremental improvements towards that ideal through HTML standardizations. React and GraphQL (both great products from fb) really make that possible.

Re: Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages

#80

Post by tjchear »

three_seagrass wrote: post #61

Ha, does this qualify as a headless cms?

Far from it! The backend is provided by Google Sheets. Much of what I do with SheetUI is to provide an easy-to-use editor and a beautiful front-end to visualize the data coming from the sheets.
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