My blog is now generated by Google Docs

This is a nice idea, especially for a case where a website is collaboratively edited. I don't love Google Docs for solo projects, and I don't enjoy using it, but its collaborative editing features are so good and reliable that I can't escape it. Being able to suggest and accept changes with commenting among a group of people would be really nice for a website for a collective, say.

That said, a bit of small, hopefully constructive feedback. The impact of this would be a bit bigger if there were more blog posts, so that by the time you reveal you're using google docs it feels more like a practical application and less like a very quick demo. Also, while I understand that there's a sort of "coder who doesn't do design" aesthetic, it might be good to at least change the colors a bit so that there's a bit more magic of transformation. This looks a bit too much like, well, a Google doc, and you want to establish that something cool is going on that couldn't be done with just an index of publicly visible google docs.

Reminds me of generating webpages from Microsoft Word. The issue is that the HTML looks pretty awful. For example, on the webpage, there's a bunch of tags that don't do anything and the inline style makes it difficult if you wanted to change the font family or color.

</span></p><p style="padding:0;margin:0;color:#000000;font-size:11pt;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;;line-height:1.15;orphans:2;widows:2;height:11pt;text-align:left"><span style="color:#000000;font-weight:400;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:11pt;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;;font-style:normal"></span></p><p style="padding:0;margin:0;color:#000000;font-size:11pt;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;;line-height:1.15;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left"><span style="color:#000000;font-weight:400;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:11pt;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;;font-style:normal">

This is great, albeit very clunky (for reasons described others, e.g. inline CSS issues).

What's amazing to me here is that I've gone through every single link I can find in these comments and haven't found anything close to a plug and play approach to creating static websites generated from Google Docs (say 1 hour at most for a fairly technical person to set up; just stringing together configuration options in e.g. Netlify, Gitlab, and perhaps Google Sheets for routing).

This is not just academic. In the early days of the US COVID pandemic response, I helped instigate the creation of n95reuse.com — a collection of the best public information available on reusing n95 masks, which was used by a number of hospitals (now thankfully the more authoritative n95decon.org exists).

This worked OK as Google Doc redirected from a memorable domain, but would have been much better as a dedicated site. But there was no good way to maintain that as we were rapidly gathering feedback and suggestions from folks on the front lines, and it would have been too much overhead for our small bandwidth constrained volunteer team. Our less professional site with a long redirected URL means that less people saw this, and more healthcare workers were likely using more unsafe protocols (or were spending crucial time replicating our research; we saw this everywhere). And people likely died.

And this is not the first urgent project I've needed this sort of tool for.

So if someone has done this plumbing and documents it, ideally with at least one good theme, please please, let me know (see profile for contact info, or respond to the thread on this here: https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1245147106697863168). At some point I might figure it out myself, but have not had a chance yet.

My first encounter with a docs -> website was the now-defunct joelewis' hexopress.com. The code; however, is opensource [0].

There's a dated, unmaintained Google Docs to Markdown converter [1] which can be used as a source for a static site generator like Hugo [2]. This is particular interesting since folks can style content as they normally would from within Google Docs and have it show up with the same styling on a webpage, rather than write HTML themselves.

[0] https://github.com/joelewis/hexopress

[1] https://github.com/mangini/gdocs2md

[2] https://gohugo.io/content-management/formats/

It’s a bit strange hitting the google redirect notice when linking from the site.

You also might want to put your .idea directory and secrets in a .gitignore

I recently used Google Sheets as a CMS for a couple of projects.

In my case I had a server-side script which read the sheets, converted the data to JSON and saved it on a file which was then fetched by the JS client. The conversion only had to run when there were updates (e.g once a day).

It was really convenient in my particular case because all users where familiar with Google Sheets, already had users and passwords, and I had good granular control over permissions.

The NYT uses docs to author interactive articles that don't fit nicely in the CMS.

I've missed that workflow a lot (comments and edits are amazing!); I just open sourced a tiny library that saves a doc as a text file.

https://github.com/1wheel/doc2txt

  npx doc2txt 1StMiAtcY6bY6yEIQp5pVSGdIHSnZG-kFspdmsSzAJdE --outpath gettysburg.txt

This isn't directly related to the post but the root of this website is hilarious: https://benwiser.com/

After building a number of [1] projects that are powered by Google Docs, I recently realised that it also means that countries (like China) where Google is blocked, won't be able to access your content.

https://upstart.me (powered by Google Docs)

> I could have set up a static site generator

Instead of generating HTML from markdown & sticking it in a template, your posts are HTML and you stick them in a template. Instead of hand-writing the HTML, you're using an HTML WYSIWYG editor (google docs).

Unless I'm missing something this is a static site generator. And if it suits your needs that's fantastic, sometimes I feel like markdown & git tracking is overkill as well (what I do). The primary thing holding me back from this is lack of code snippets.

Incidentally how does it handle images?

My take: https://sequoia.makes.software/lets-code-it-static-site-gene...

Way back I considered using Microsoft Word as my content editor for my blog, and wrote a PHP script that converted .docx files to static HTML. To publish all I had to do was upload a new .docx file to a given directory on my shared host and wait for the script to run.

It converted the Word "Heading 1" etc styles to some CSS class, and had support for extracting inline images etc. I relied on convention for certain things like post title, and it didn't support too fancy things in the Word document.

At that time .docx was rather new, so I wasn't sure if it would stick around. Also I wasn't sure this was the best idea ever, so I ended up with something else. But it was a fun adventure.

You can do this with Emvi [1] too. It works like a headless CMS. I wrote a wiki for a German gaming community [2]. The project is available on GitHub [3] if anyone is interested and can easily be adopted to your own project. The articles fit a blog very well as they don't use pages and therefor are continuous. The API spits out clean HTML.

[1] https://emvi.com/

[2] https://wiki.sts.wtf/

[3] https://github.com/Special-Tactical-Service/wiki

Hey all, keep in mind that this is an experiment and the OP is therefore looking for input from users. Don't look at it from a finished product point of view but as a starting point and give your ideas. I think this is a great solution a quick in office CMS for in house projects.

I built an app that lets you create a blog from Google docs.

https://youdontneedwp.com

This website: https://www.fgbg.art/, is powered by this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W8RE885PVF2z3L9KU9LS...

The spreadsheet not being normalized is a bit annoying, but I could fix that if I really wanted to. All in all, I actually find using Google as a data source like this works pretty well.

Blot.im does this but with dropbox and its amazing. Since you use word docs instead of g docs the formatting transfers over perfectly. Super easy setup and $20/yr. I’ve been using it for 2 or 3 years and it’s great.

Npzero.com is my blog if you want to see an example. There are much prettier themes you can choose from as well. I have a chrome book so sometimes I write in g docs, export to word, and upload to Dropbox’s webapp and make final adjustments in their online editor. No affiliation, just a great product.

Cool idea, but I worry about over reliance on Google or other big tech players, especially after their recent steps to ramp up censorship. Another example is that Medium blocked many informative COVID-19 posts recently despite them being thoughtful and necessary discussions, especially given the repeated failings of the WHO. What’s a great blog platform that features a lack of censorship or protection against censorship as a feature?

So there's a few things I'd take issue with here. Firstly, writing a static site with a little bit of CSS is easier than ever. Not only are there lots of neat CSS files that will help you, but browsers actually are fairly good at functioining more or less the same. There was a time that writing corect CSS was a real art, but that's not really true as much today. Secondly, I think this is one of many examples of creating an incredibly complex solution to a trivial problem - the initial problem isn't a problem, and linking into an incredibly hefty cloud based system just seems nuts in my opinion. Finally, who exactly is looking to try and increase their dependence on google?

I think part of my opinion comes from that latex/vim bent, where you're using very programmatic, specific idioms to get what you wrote, and if you're less comfortably with that then maybe you appreciate all the work of building some google docs based on monstrosity, but the more experience I've gained, the more I've learned to use the right tool for the job. Google docs isn't a blogging tool, so don't use it as one.

Good work - bonus points for having it work with JS disabled - a surprising number of blogs need JS to even render for some reason.

A while ago was facing a similar dilemma, so I went with this:

https://sapper.svelte.dev/

Plus a one-step deploy process made in Ansible by a friend of mine.

My take is that while Sapper isn't exactly production-ready, it's a otherwise competent static-site generator.

I write my posts in markdown and the system adds styling and modifications like target=_blank for links in a consistent manner.

Best thing about it is that I managed to use the experience from building my blog to help a friend who's an artist to set up his webcomic - also a static site.

The friend in question knows how to use FTP but that's about the extent of his technical skills, so the process involves him modifying a JSON file by adding an object with the comic title, flavour text and of course image URL to an array, running the generator and uploading the result.

The landscape of systems for this use case is pretty horrible, so this approach proved to be more pragmatic.

God forbid if Google lifted their hands some day, can you even imagine how many million people will be impacted due to how many services ranging from emails to map apps to cloud services to web services, etc? Is it wise to give one entity power over so many things or its better to encourage a decentralized structure where multiple organizations control only bits of the pie?

What about just using Google Sites? They have updated UI and improved functionality quite a bit. You can even link your own domain.

I’ve been thinking about going the other way a bit recently: having bots consume input from and add their output to a Google Doc.

There are so many processes in most businesses which involve many humans collaborating on templatised documents. Google Docs/Sheets fits into these workflows very well, but there’s often scope for some partial automation in there too - pulling information from databases and outside sources and keeping it in sync, etc. Developing custom web apps for each case is too much effort for too little reward, takes users out of a familiar (and well-liked) interface which updates in real-time, makes you reimplement permission models, etc.

Not something I’ve explored properly yet so I don’t know if the APIs are rich enough to make this easy, but I would really like to give it a look.

I'm finishing up with a simplistic template for Zim wiki. That will enable me to have a website with nice Wysywig interface divorced from web bloat and limitiations, but also some of its convenience.

https://zim-wiki.org/

Love using Docs as a source. A while back I wrote a service[1] which creates an API using Google Drive and Docs as a source. Docs are naturally pages, and the Drive folder structure builds the hierarchy/tree of pages using a pretty simple naming convention (Mainly for ordering). The CMS/collaborative aspect is great. Some things that aren't ideal are:

  - Seeing print-style page breaks in docs
  - Formatting images. Although, having Google host them is nice
  - The html Google Drive generates is inlined, inconsistent, and pretty nasty. I resorted to using markdown in Docs.

1. https://github.com/psaia/allwrite-docs

The first version of https://makersupv.com/ was made with Google Drive as well:

- There was a spreadsheet with the list of articles and some meta-information such as publication date, "published" flag, etc. This was then extracted with https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db on a Node.js backend.

- Then each article was written as a single google docs document, so we could edit them collaboratively.

Meta: The front-end was built with https://picnicss.com/, which is a library I also created for this project.

I've run a little round robin/bracketed tournament website through the Google sheets JSON API once. It was a really easy way to have an interface for the organizers to update scores and players.

Hah, interesting project. I built something similar a while ago (https://github.com/nicolas-fricke/google-doc-blog) using article_json: https://github.com/Devex/article_json

With that, you also get support for embedded objects like Youtube videos and the like :)

Feel free to reach out for more info!

Omg, it is quite a good idea! Was wondering if that follows the same idea as using markdown as your post, and each post is actually just a markdown file? Here's my blog and each post is basically just a markdown file! Just wanted to share with all of you.

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-02-29-articles-in-sec...

seeing secrets.txt in the repo gave me a fright for a second and it's not even my project

Great job, thanks for sharing!

Some might like this adoption of the idea: I work in consulting and have to prepare presentations all of the time.

Therefore, I created a Powerpoint generator that uses a Google Sheet as a source: http://demo.inf.university

<-- It doesn't look spectacular, but it saved me really a lot of time. “Can you prepare a briefing about X,Y,Z” – “Sure, it will take -cough- about 3 days” :-)

Would be interesting with more details on how this works. Like how the URL works and how the pages are styled. Is there any services needed beside google docs, etc.

I recently learned (via Rich Harris's recent Svelte Society Day talk[1]) that the New York Times does something like this using a custom markup language called ArchieML[2].

[1]: https://youtu.be/luM5uobewhA?t=1301

[2]: http://archieml.org/

The URL to your GitLab project goes via a Google redirect. I'm guessing this in an unintentional side-effect of using Google Docs as CMS?

Shameless plug: We've been working hard on https://nocode.works - which turns Google docs into nice looking websites.

We think it's perfect for documentation for non-technical companies who don't know what Markdown is.

Shameless plug

I built https://versoly.com/ you can get a blog started is less than 5 minutes.

I have sees a lot of folks talk about gatsby and static site generators but most never blog.

They spend too much time playing with style sheets etc.

I saw someone I was working with using Google docs for seed data, I actually think this is quite cool as long as it's performed in two steps (pull, insert) as you still want to be able to recreate offline or should Google docs explode (or price or cancellation).

I'm more of a Markdown, maybe LaTeX guy myself, but 100% down with the author's approach.

The simplest "CI/CD", and closest to the material (plain text files), is usually the best in practice, especially for a one-man operation.

Iterate into complexity on a need-to-basis.

It would be cool if it was 100% live... Ie. with every keystroke the website is updated. Does the Google Docs API have some kind of event based notification of new keystrokes you could hook into?

I run my wishlist from a Google Sheets document. It's a bit annoying that you can't have gaps in rows in the spreadsheet, since fetching as JSON will only return up until the first gap.

Have you planned for what you will do if Google shuts down your account?

This is awesome! I have a site made with Jekyll and it took a good amount of massaging to make it look somewhat presentable. I wish there was a way to integrate with Jekyll.

Check out ArchieML which the NYTimes built for when they use Google Docs for publishing

http://archieml.org/

I don't really understand the argument against something like jekyll. There is no special styling as of now anyway so why would jekyll need any?

I would only worry that the Google API access changes or gets pulled altogether. Otherwise it has some benefits, including collaboration.

Based on Google's reputation of maintaining both products and API's I think I will give this a pass.

What's wrong with blogger? You know https://www.blogger.com/

Also run by Google. Also subject to all their rules. But also robust with a simple clean interface.

I wish there were a simple free way for me to enjoy free speech. I already pay for dropbox. Why can't dropbox let me assign a folder in my account become a blog.

And this is your only blog post?

Shameless plug incoming... I made the equivalent but for APIs using Google Sheets :) https://sheet2api.com/

>wordpress (I really don’t like wordpress).

I really don't like your blog