Send a file to your Dropbox from its URL. | Hacker News Reader

Send a file to your Dropbox from its URL.

web2db.ssl.dotcloud.com

25 pointsnmb10 comments

Hi nmb, this looks interesting, thanks. Tested it out on small text files and it works. What is your upload and download bandwidth? I think it would be better if it showed the list of files, their status/progress, and ability to delete a file from the queue.

The app is completely run and hosted on DotCloud, so bandwidth is limited by their capacity. Right now when you submit a URL it's added to a global queue, and a separate python process goes through that queue and uploads them asynchronously on a first come, first-served basis. So with my current architecture it would be difficult to implement the functionality you describe but I agree that it would be cool. Smugmug's photo uploader has a similar feature; I should look into how they do it. (Or if anyone knows or has an idea, feel free to chime in!)

How do you host an app on DotCloud? Is that functionality built in or did you arrange it with them?

Yeah, DotCloud is all about hosting apps on their platform. ;) They have support for background processes, redis, postgres, and wsgi, so they were basically perfect for my use case. The best place to get started is DotCloud's own docs, as well as this blog post (specifically for django): http://kencochrane.net/blog/2011/04/deploying-my-django-appl...

Oh and they let you use their SSL certificate for free, which is pretty nice. The only downside is that the certificate isn't recognized by some versions of the Android browser, but I'm sure that will be fixed soon enough as their support guy is incredibly quick to respond to issues.

2-day project of mine. Hope someone finds it useful!

That's totally awesome.

thanks :)

Out of curiosity, what use case do you see for this?

Future features would be being able to let users specify which folder they want the file to go to and be able to change the file name. Also, just FYI the example link is broken for me. But I'm more interested in the use case, since this seems cool but I don't know when I'd find it helpful.

People might use it for different things, but I made it so that I'd have a convenient way to download a file to my desktop from my phone. Using the native Dropbox client, I'd have to download the file to my phone first, then upload it.

Also, thanks for reporting the issue with the example link. It's still working for me, though (it's supposed to fill in the URL field with a URL to a text file). What browser are you using?

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