Show HN: Pancake.io, simple CMS in your Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pancake.io, simple CMS in your Dropbox

pancake.io

8 pointsoctavore4 comments

I wanted to share some information with a friend. Google Docs felt too heavyweight for what I had in mind, since the document was basically a text file, and he only needed read access. I also wanted to be able to update the file, so emailing it was out of the question.

As a result, I built Pancake, which lets me turn text files in my Dropbox account into static webpages, processed using Markdown. It works wherever Dropbox does: I can edit the text file right on my desktop or on my phone (using Nebulous Notes), and the changes are instantly synced to the page.

I've only been at it for about a week and a half, and would love to hear your feedback!

Sample page: http://pancake.io/tp/sus2011 (my (very incomplete) startup school notes from last Saturday)

ps. This is a bit of a repost, since I posted it earlier without having my Dropbox developer account approved for production (but deleted the post as soon as I realized it)

I signed up last week, and I am looking forward to seeing it work.

It's kind of what I've been looking for, the ability to directly edit simple web pages in emacs and push them out with very little cognitive overhead.

So I logged in using my name/passwd from hawk.

The various pages you have, files, settings, ... don't give much indication I am logged in, they do offer me the logout, but they don't identify the account name, ja2038, so it's hard to know if I am logged in or not

It's not clear what the url to my pages is. I tried: http://pancake.io/$name but it would just redirect to http://pancake.io/dropbox. I would suggest each page (file, settings, etc.) should include my account name, and the basic url to my files.

Is the folder to be created in dropbox called pancake, or pancake.io? It's not clear from the files page, and no folders were created.

Have you played with the chrome extension SourceKit? It seems like a natural complement to Pancake.

I hear you about indicating logged-in status. I'll try to put it in by the end of today.

I'm sure you've seen it by now, but generally it takes a moment for the folder to be created, in ~/Dropbox/Apps/Pancake.io

Once you add a file to that folder, it will appear in the Files page (instead of the welcome message). Click on it to view it, and there'll be a link for you to copy too.

SourceKit looks pretty awesome, especially the javascript-based text editor they're using. I had a basic text field set up for small amendments, but this looks like it could be a nice replacement for that.

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