Show HN: I made a platform to publish my Google Docs files as blogs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a platform to publish my Google Docs files as blogs

hexo.press

180 pointslewisjoe54 comments

Congratulation on shipping! The experience was flawless and quick.

Two things I noticed which I hope you will consider fixing:

- It was trivially easy to expose the user's google/gmail address by typing in a random URL within the user's blog. The 404 page exposes the user's email address. [0] Probably better to have some UUID-email mapping that is secret.

- When I clicked "Delete Account/Blog", the application did not remove itself from Google's "Apps with access to your account" page and was still showing up as an active integration.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/PG8Em4S.png

Thank you for pointing this out.

#1 - I'll deactivate debug mode ASAP and the 404 page shouldn't have any extra info henceforth.

#2 - Yes, it's better to revoke google's scopes as well. I'll work on this one.

Django debug is quite dangerous to expose online. Are you hosting this on your own computers?

> It was trivially easy to expose the user's google/gmail address by typing in a random URL within the user's blog.

This one is fixed now!

I went to the GitHub repo you included at the bottom of the page and I noticed you don’t include a license. Without a license everyone who clones, forks, or otherwise uses you code is violating your copyright. Maybe that’s your intention, but if not you should consider adding an appropriate license that defines what use of your code is and isn’t allowed.

This is pretty awesome! If anyone wants something similar but for documentation check this out: https://github.com/nytimes/library

Funny, Medium spent all this time working on (and blogging about) the perfect editor, and you simply use Google Docs.

This is common in journalism. The NYT created ArchieML with this workflow in mind and Politico has Gootenberg which uses Google Docs.

This is amazing! Do you have a plan to support subfolders?

I'd love to use something like this for docs instead of a blog.

I wrote about my setup here: https://0x0ece.medium.com/docs-for-an-open-source-project-b7...

I manually manage the md files inside my repo and publish via jekyll+github pages. But I do most of the actual writing/commenting work in gdocs, so automating gdoc -> md is just awesome!

I use a google doc for my resume that I have on my website. I download the doc html from the embedded link in an Ajax call and then throw the result in the innerHTML of a div.

https://jeremyrobertanderson.com/#resume

There is pretty well known static site generator https://hexo.io/ At first I thought that name similarity indicates that you are using it somewhere as part of pipeline but apparently not.

Whoa neat, I only skimmed through the demo but are there ways to add images?

I've been using this approach for my blog and I've been loving it :) Seems like Google Docs for blogs is a bit of a golden ticket to the front page on hackernews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23134101).

I'm a bit hesitant about using an external service for something like this however. I just have a cronjob running on the server I use for my website and that's worked out pretty well.

Curious if you'll be affected by "Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering".

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...

Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858

Author here! :) No it won't. I was the one who submitted that piece to HN, and the first thing I was worried was how it will break hexo.press.

Apparently, only extensions are affected and hexo.press is a service that uses Google's meta APIs, which are not affected.

From looking at the code, I think it's basically just downloading the relevant google docs files as docx (or markdown if the file's just .md) and converting it into octopress, so I don't think it will matter.

Source: https://github.com/joelewis/hexopress/blob/55f55c39136ef301f...

This comment caught my eye because I use a lot of markdown. What do you mean about downloading the file as markdown if it's just an .md?

I haven't ever created a .md in Google Docs and I don't see a way to download one.

Edit: After looking at the code, I think the comment applies to Google Drive and not Google Docs. I only use Google Drive via the web interface and it's a bit of a pain to "create" an md file via that interface.

I deleted my previous comment since it was irrelevant. Yes, you are right. I wanted to write markdown files and make them as posts. So I wrote that piece of code that, looks for md files as well, in addition to Google Doc files – for publishing as posts.

Helps me write code-blocks heavy posts in markdown directly in Google Drive, using markdown extensions. Google Docs is yet to support code blocks and by now I doubt they ever will :(

Yeah I agree, it really sucks that really basic things like equations, code-blocks, and captions in images aren't supported in Google Docs, it's an incredible dealbreaker.

Google slides doesn't even support vector graphics. Given the tech-savvy nature of people at Google, I've long suspected that nobody there actually uses Google Docs.

That's not quite true. You can import EMF (and SVG with some effort)

https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/115814/how...

I've never found any of these kinds of approaches to actually work; I always end up with a rasterized image that I could have gotten by just taking a screenshot.

Curious if anyone has seen something like this to publish Mailchimp newsletters on the web. Mailchimp's "archive" page is weak.

I have a weekly newsletter on carbon removal, published on Mailchimp. My site [1] starts with a script that pulls from the Mailchimp API, compiles pages and an archive, and deploys on vercel. Plus some static files for homepage/header/footer are pulled in.

[1] https://tito.co

Can't you do that with a simple zappier integration? Just thinking out loud. When I wrote hexo.press I also wanted to make a full-featured CMS with Google Drive as the backend, but then I realized a lot of this can be achieved with Zapier and can be done generically as well - adaptable for Microsoft OneDrive, Zoho Workdrive or Google Drive

Did you already try Zapier?

I adore Zapier! But how would I use it in this case? I can imagine triggering with a new Mailchimp campaign, but where would it post to?

You could set up a Zapier integration with Ghost (ghost.org). Use Zapier to publish every Mailchimp newsletter as a Ghost article maybe? Hope I helped.

Was curious how the document conversion happened: It's using Pandoc to convert .docx files downloaded from Google Docs into markdown files.

Hadn't seen Pandoc before. It's a Haskell library/cli that supports a large number of input/output document formats in varying degrees of completeness: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc

I would pay for a hosted version and would love to donate to this in general.

2 separate questions:

How do I remove or edit individual posts?

If I want to delete an account and blog, the option "Sign out" link - https://hexo.press/logout doesn't seem different from the actual "Delete Account and Blog". Am I missing something? Also, definitely should confirm a deletion of a blog page.

Otherwise, great idea and implementation.

I really like the large font on the main website. It could be considered a bit extreme, but it made it very easy to quickly understand the product

I hope Google Drive had a permission that allows access to only specific folders.

There are many interesting tools built on top of GDocs and GDrive including this one, but giving the full access permission to GDrive is too scary to me. Even if the developers have no malicious intention (which I believe is most of the case), the possibility of data breach cannot be overlooked.

Yes, Google has to fix this soon. I was bummed when I got know there is no way to restrict my scope to only the folder that I create on behalf of hexopress. There was no other way than to ask for more liberal scope.

Hope Google breaks the drive scopes down to more fine-grained levels.

This is pretty cool! There is a whole wave of young people that are using Chromebooks and therefore Google Docs at school every day. They will be most comfortable with writing in Gdocs. I could see a product like this becoming very popular.

I mostly used MS Word to write essays at school growing up and to this day my ideas flow best when I have Word open on a desktop computer.

Lol you could live edit blogs made with hexopress using Hitsnag.com too add info to them on the go! This is really cool.

This is just what I was looking for, thank you. I already started a blog with some skeleton markdown files that I made hoping to find a platform like this. http://hexo.press/@SMT/

Very cool, love writing docs in google, but find sharing it out somewhat lackluster. Couple q's

1. What sort of SEO is there/do you plan to add? 2. I onboarded through the product @rob, and then moved a doc to the hexopress folder in drive. How long does it take to refresh?

It doesn’t refresh by itself. Once you finish writing your doc, you have to sign into hexopress once and click refresh blog once.

Hi, I was following the project for a while but lost track. What's changed since 4 years ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857137

I lost the domain name (https://hexopress.com), but got a better one: it's https://hexo.press now

Feature wise, the web UI now lets you write a small "About" piece that gets populated in your blog's sidebar.

Google Analytics support is something I added sometime later, but you might want to take a loot at that one too :)

i have been hoping for this for a long time: http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/12/blogging-tools

If you're interested in a wiki which works in a similar way then take a lot at https://youneedawiki.com/

We use YNAW. I was impressed with how easy it was to set up. It's simple enough for anyone to use.

I saw another comment about a project that does a similar things, but is self-hosted and requires some more involved setup:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145952

I'd love to know if anyone who has used both can comment on their experience after initial setup.

Just curious, how does the syntax highlighting work in the demo blog?

Ah, I haven't mentioned it anywhere. You can also drop .md files in your "hexopress" folder in Google drive. These will show up as posts as well :)

I use this to write posts that need code-blocks and also, I love markdown!

Not sure if it would be possible, but I would love a way to do WYSIWYG code-block editing directly in google docs

I tried the code-blocks google docs extension which looked right in my doc, but that didn't seem to work with hexopress

This reminds me that google drive used to support hosting static site directly from a folder, as well as dropbox. Later all those online storage platforms dropped that feature.

Small typo:

Not everytime you have a brilliant idea,

Now everytime you have a brilliant idea,

It's actually not a typo, just an awkward sentence. I thought the same until I read it a few times.

Very nice. Recently I was thinking about doing this myself. Now I don’t have to! Yay procrastination.

This is very nice. Once again I am happy that another Django project especially OSS noticed in HN

This is a badass project, especially for one regarded as a time filler. Congrats!

Looks great! I’m a “hackers with terminals and gits” but may recommend this.

Very nice. Is there a built-in way to enable post comments?

Users who have enabled Advanced Protection will not be able to use your service ("Error 400: policy_enforced"). Maybe add a note about that.

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