Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites | Hacker News Reader

Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites

site44.com

134 pointssongzme69 comments

I give site44 a few weeks before they have to stop. DropBox, unless they have changed in the last ~6 months, won't let you do this. I'm not sure if it's in their TOS anymore since they went through the whole TOS fiasco a while back, but I've tried this and been shut down.

I'm not known on the Internet at all. I have perhaps 30 friends in Facebook. I had a Wordpress blog and grabbed an image I had sitting in DropBox and used it's public URL. I posted a link on Facebook. Within an hour Dropbox had detected "unusual" activity and disabled the image.

Further, I've tried sharing a 700MB movie ( personal project I self edited ) to a small group of friends. I sent an email to 5 people, so there were 5 or less downloads. The movie was disabled for too much bandwidth use.

I do only have the free Dropbox account, and in the past have linked to a small jpg and posted that to a mailing list for css so it was probably hit thousands of times and that was allowed to stay.

I'm not sure what their internal system is set for as to rules for xfer amounts and number of hits, but in my experience, it's pretty low.

A novel idea, though I would think anyone who knows how to make an HTML site is already locally previewing it, so they would already know how to put it in their public folder. Having a custom domain name point to it is nice. Is site44 proxying the requests? Most isp's don't like this sort of thing either. Any significant traffic outbound on 80 might set off some bells.

I do think it's good to try. The more that use it the more it may send a message to our isp's to stop having so many silly rules. And maybe DropBox will lighten up on theirs.

Is the OP link served from DropBox? I'll bet it isn't.

Hi, I'm one of Site44's founders.

We've been running for about six months now and have thousands of users, and Dropbox has helped us with our API use since the beginning. Yes, the OP (www.site44.com) is hosted on Site44.

Here's a guest post on the Dropbox developer blog about how we use their API: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/23

Perhaps your confusion is that you assume we're using Dropbox public folders or that Dropbox is hosting the content in some way. This isn't true. (We're serving all the content ourselves and only need to talk to Dropbox to get files that change.)

Yep, my bad, I didn't notice you were sucking the site up and hosting it yourself, I thought you found a crafty way to service dropbox through the OS over the users local port. My mistake.

Great idea and good luck.

Any examples anyone can show? I'd be interested to see how these pages perform.

Super basic Pelican site I made as a test a few weeks back: http://mlapida.site44.com/

Performs well. Cheers.

www.site44.com itself is hosted on Site44. My blog is too (http://blog.smarx.com).

Be careful when testing performance... browser refreshes trigger us going back to Dropbox to look for changes to files, so they're considerably slower than just navigating around a site (where we typically serve pages from an in-memory cache).

EDIT: Forgot to mention I'm one of the founders of Planet Rational (the company that made this).

Are you using the /delta API? https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/15

Yes. See our guest post on that same blog: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/23

Would that mean that a user on one of these sites could negatively impact the performance of the site by just refreshing it a bunch?

No, not really. Only the person pressing refresh would get slower responses, and we do limit the number of calls we'll make to Dropbox for a given site.

I may not have explained properly. What happens is that when we get a request that looks like a refresh, we ask Dropbox for updates before we fulfill the request. So it's only that specific request that is slowed down.

One I upped, d3 + foundation(really raw && lame && in portuguese):

visubr.site44.com

Similar service but allows you to have dynamic pages

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025901

Google Drive recently announced a feature similar to this: http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/11/announcing-g...

Cool idea. Homepage needs tweaked for iPad. Content pushed to absolute edges with 0 margin.

Thanks. We'll take a look.

I've found this exact problem before with Bootstrap. I solved it, but it was perhaps 6mo ago and don't remember, otherwise I'd take care of it for you.

Congrats again on shipping a kick-ass product.

I used to work with a guy who built something similar: http://droppages.com/

    -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;

This CSS rule in that site is the worst kind of CSS rule; one that disables basic browser functionality.

I wonder, why webkit made this in first place!

I created a similar service last winter: http://www.kissr.com/.

A friend of mine talked to Drew Houston about the idea at a conference and Housten loved it!

1124 people have signed up for KISSr but I have yet to get anyone to pay for it.

I have since lost interest in the project.

I still think it is a great idea and I am glad someone is running with it!

Hi. I'm one of Site44's founders. If you're no longer working on KISSr, do you want to suggest to users that they migrate over to Site44? Ping me if you want to chat: smarx@site44.com.

Heh, this comment reminds me of exactly what Dale Carnegie recommends NOT to do when reaching out to another party.[1]

If you're actually interested in making this happen I'd recommend you reach out to him privately and at least provide an incentive for him to help you out.

1. http://books.google.com/books?id=1rW-QpIAs8UC&pg=PA38

https://harp.io/ is doing something similar as well.

Something I have been doing at home since I got my hand on the command line client - but the idea to commercialize the package is just great !

Hosting has become a commodity - but you can sell ease of use - especially if publishing a website is a dropbox drag'n drop away.

You can do this now with Google Drive and the Neutron Drive app: https://neutron-drive.appspot.com/

Awesome!

http://paperplane.io is a similar service that I've been working on.

Another remake: http://pancake.io/

For those without time to check them out... paperplane.io is pretty much exactly the same as site44 except it's $9/mth. pancake.io is a little different - seems to be aimed at hosting markdown formatted files and allowing you to either link directly to them or embed a little widget on another site linking to the files you have hosted on dropbox (sorted by most recently edited etc)

I love it! Works like charm for small projects, for example I've built a simple private app that is both hosted on Dropbox (thru Site44) and uses Dropbox as DB (thru API), so everything is in one "box" which makes working on it really pleasant :)

I had been looking for something like that for a web host chart I was making, but someone on HN pointed it out to me: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4846110

Maybe I just don't get it, but who is the target audience for something like this ?

Quickly deploy an easily editable site at no cost. Off the top of my head; for me this would be useful for showing HTML work in progress to clients.

EDIT: Didn't realise the free option only allows 100MB/month. Turns out this is kind of useless for me :(

It'd be very useful for laypeople. No FTP, no SSH, no SCP... You just drag and drop - I can definitely see it taking off.

Actually, I think I'll be using it too for shenglong.ca where I keep a bunch of static content. Lots of people have domains, but don't really pay for any servers during project down times (blasphemy, I know!)

But these same lay people are going to create html and css files ?

I'm not trying to obtuse but I'm having a hard time seeing the value proposition of something like this.

Maybe these lay people pay a few hundred dollars to a freelancer for a simple website and don't know a good hosting option. E.g., I just designed a very simple, 3-page static site for a roofing company.

It's easier than ftp, and I suspect ftp is the most commonly used deployment mechanism on the internet.

Doesn't Dropbox impose transfer limits? I've seen public items hosted in Dropbox become popular and then quietly inaccessible as more people tried to reach them.

Perhaps that's not the use case that's intended here?

I'd assume it's getting sync'd to a webserver, so dropbox isnt public

Exactly. Site44 only uses Dropbox for the sync, then serves out the site over its own infrastructure.

Very interesting idea! This is really smart and handy for small business or blogs. I wonder what Dropbox thinks of this idea.. maybe they should incorporate it into their own service?

Hi, I'm one of Site44's founders. Dropbox has been quite supportive in helping us to use their API. If you're curious how we interact with Dropbox, read our guest post on their developer blog: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/23.

Sounds very useful, but can't you just put pages in your public folder?

The public folders are going away

Has anyone made a generic Dropbox<->S3 bucket sync client yet?

Yes. We created Backup Box back in March to solve this problem. https://mybackupbox.com

We have also released our technology as an API at http://mover.io

Feedback is welcome!

Mover.io looks like a great idea. I've been fiddling about with S3 and FTP wrappers, so this looks helpful. I'm looking forward to my API key.

Nice. I haven't even checked advanced features links, but I imagine it wouldn't be difficult to copy the files to a more suitable cloud storage if dropbox transfer limits become an issue.

Yes. We do some stuff that's not as easy to copy (like custom mime types and redirects), but certainly the goal is that you can easily just copy the files elsewhere.

http://tinysite.heroku.com/ will do s/th similar. Hosted on free Heroku plans.

Guys, just want to say thanks. This site is awesome. Exactly what I was looking for when I woke up this morning.

Thanks! (I'm one of the founders.)

How do you make a website that is 100% client side? Where is the SQL, PHP? I am not sure I know who this for...

There are static sites all over the web that have no SQL or PHP or anything like that (http://shows-app.com/, http://www.usefabric.com/). Static site generators like jekyll could use something like this. Splash pages for startups and apps could also use this.

I've found it great for quickly showing clients a semi-functional mockup or prototype. I just replace my database connection with a big lump of json. Great if most of your application logic is in javascript.

Tons of people make websites without SQL or a server side language.

Here's a list of static website generators:

http://iwantmyname.com/blog/2011/02/list-static-website-gene...

My personal site is just a couple html files.

Javascript, REST APIs, d3.js, static websites, landing pages... one day you'll figure it out

Imagine taking what a user sees in their browser when they view-source and giving them that.

Let's take a blog, for instance. What you effectively do is pre-render all your blog posts into ready-to-be-served HTML. When you visit a Wordpress site, PHP takes over and custom builds the response for the request. EVERY request that isn't being cached effectively.

Now there are tradeoffs. You won't be able to have some user/visitor specific data like user profile. You have to get crafty with what else you take for granted that is exposed through server-side languages and database persistence. You have to push functionality out to the front-end if you wish to have a rich content site.

What are the benefits? Substantially less server load as this is just serving static assets (HTML, JS, CSS, images). Lessened security concerns ( absence of SQL injection, Cross-site scripting attack vector from untrusted user content is removed). Highly cacheable content. Less 'moving parts' to worry about which could break in production.

Your site can still be managed by PHP, Ruby, Python, etc and have a database backing it, but it is not accessible from the Internet by visitors. A static site solves a defined set of problems, but it is definitely not a hammer.

You should have a clear link to pricing in the front page. Now it's hidden behind "learn more".

I have been using Dropbox to store my utility html/js pages for a long time already....

I would probably use this if PHP were enabled.

this is effing amazing. it's site control for dumbasses with a simple yet familiar interface of dropbox. #LOVE IT

http://get.drapache.com/ does the same thing. yaawn.

but.. it just allow static content, good to make it a CDN :D

This is already possible through the public folder function on Dropbox.

You can still turn it on in Dropbox if you don't have it.

Public folders don't work consistently in countries that Dropbox has deemed a piracy risk. Doesn't work in India, for example.

The old /u/ trick doesn't seem to work anymore.

There is a post above by a guy who makes a significant case that dropbox will eventually shut you off for such usage patterns. -- Also, can you use your own domain that way?

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