Host webpages on Google Drive | Hacker News Reader

Host webpages on Google Drive

googledrive.com

216 pointsHugoDias63 comments

I think this might be a pretty nice tool for people learning how to program for the web, in that it's easy to share a link with friends for some quick feedback.

http://www.site44.com/ does the same thing for Dropbox.

Syncdocs http://syncdocs.com lets you publish a website to Google Drive right from your desktop. It also gives a much shorter goo.gl URL, and automatically re-publishes changes.

However, Google Drive might has usage restrictions, so this is probably only for low traffic sites.

Sweet, now you can get your own URLs that are as ugly as Google+ ones.

That's a bit of a whiny comment! Use something else if you don't like the Urls. Urls are less relevant these days anyway. Who types Urls anymore? Or who even looks at them?

Word, the complaining about things is endless.

Google is no charity, sure. But they make it easy for people to develop web apps, prototype and monkey with web content, they allow people to share their work with a simple click, but GOD the URLs are not good enough for some random dude on the Internets, we'd better throw our arms in the air and get all snarky about it.

With this trend of negativity I guess we've found the cure for mortality. It gets REALLY old but somehow never dies.

Whining about whining. So meta.

Who types URLs or looks at them? If you write URLs in an email, print them on a business card, put them on a poster, say them in a conversation, or basically need anybody who isn't already using a web browser to go to your page, you type URLs and look at them (or hear them). Hearing is the worst offender.

- Hey there, you should check out this really cool site/post/app/thing!

- That sounds nice, where should I go?

- You go to uh.. googledrive dot com slash host slash zero capital B ehh... forget it.

There is a reason that facebook gave their users vanity URLs, and twitter user URLs are so minimalist, and people pay millions for domain names. A shorter URL is more useful and hence more valuable.

Having the option to point your own domain at the folder would be really nice, actually, and put this on the same tier as Github Pages and S3.

I thought he did not mean type but look.

Now you could see a very unreadable url in browser's address bar. If you share the url without shorten it, it's looks ugly.

You would never put a link like this on a business card or relay it in person anyway. You'd probably just hyperlink some text on a blog or in an email. It's pretty clear that this isn't a permanent web hosting solution.

Nifty. Note, however, that if you want to use it to share javascript demos or something, and you're on a google apps domain that forces https, you might hit something similar to "[blocked] The page at https://googledrive.com/whatever ran insecure content from http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.min.js. So you'll have to include your own copy of jQuery or Require or whatever.

If you use Google's hosted libraries, you can embed it like so, and it should seamlessly work over SSL.

Same goes for cdnjs, jsdelivr, bootstrapcdn, etc.

You can use the Google CDN's copy of the jQuery file -- it supports HTTPS. The URL would be : https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.0/jquery.mi...

The CDN also hosts a few of other popular libraries too : https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide

now it says: "There are currently too many people viewing this file. Please try again later."

#whois googledrive.com Registrant: Matt Serlin DNStination Inc. 303 Second Street Suite 800 North San Francisco CA 94107 US admin@dnstinations.com +1.4155319335 Fax: +1.4155319336

Note that the name servers are correct, though: ns{1-4}.google.com

They serve user supplied JS from googledrive.com domain? Can it be done in a secure way?

What security issue are you thinking of? JavaScript doesn't run anything server-side...

Being able to serve JavaScript from Google's own servers makes it easier to do a cross-site scripting attack against someone else's Google Drive site. Since the malicious JS would be from the same origin, it's no longer cross-site, and gets a free pass around some of the browser's anti-XSS features.

thanks... good info.. I knew I was forgetting something..

JavaScript can access any page and cookie from the same domain. So if I visited your googledrive.com hosted site, JavaScript from your site could potentially retrieve and send to you any other content on googledrive.com to which I have access.

thanks.. I was sure I was forgetting something...

Dropbox also does that. You can potentially host your website within your 'Public' Dropbox folder.

I'm sure Google is not using http://googledrive.com/ for anything that's user-identifiable.

The only harm that I think can happen with JS is you being able to access/set any cookies/storage that are set by another 'public' site hosted on Google Drive that you've accessed earlier.

Dropbox shuts links down if you get any significant traffic.

That doesn't sound very fun...

Really? Could you give more detail - at what level of traffic do they shut down links?

https://www.dropbox.com/help/45/en

Looks like 20GB (free) or 200GB (paid) per day.

That's PER link, so you can drop it in another folder, change the link, and maybe it refreshes since it's a different link? Can someone from Dropbox confirm this?

Seems like more than enough for simple sites shared with a bunch of people you know. That is about 600 GBs of bandwidth a month, for free.

If you need more bandwidth, you would probably be looking at any of the other innumerable hosting solutions available on the web.

Note that Dropbox discourages the use of Public folders. New accounts don't get one unless you know to request it.

> I'm sure Google is not using http://googledrive.com/ for anything that's user-identifiable.

Look at the screenshot in the article. It is in fact using https://googledrive.com/

Yes, it uses googledrive.com, but not for anything user-identifiable.

The threat is that a user logs in to googledrive.com and receives an authentication cookie tied to their Google account. Later, they view a malicious user page at googledrive.com/host/someevilpage, and a script on that page reads the authentication cookie and sends it to the attacker, who can now log in to googledrive.com as the victim.

That doesn't happen here because you don't actually log in to googledrive.com. The worst a malicious script could do is harvest data set by other scripts, and that's a drastically smaller (although still present) threat.

you don't need to login in to have session cookeis isn't it? The google session cookies work in all google services a like isn't it?

Google Online Security Blog - Content hosting for the modern web: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2012/08/content-hos...

I can see this being extremely useful for someone just getting into web development that needs a free place to host some stuff.

I recently started using Github as my blogging plaform. I just created a repo called 'thoughts' which has a bunch of markdown files inside.

When I create a new 'post' I just share the link to the markdown file on twitter/g+.

I can imagine someone using this feature in a similar way. A super lightweight, quick, and easy way to share some content.

Sometimes just getting the content out is far more important than having a nice website or url.

Right up until the underlying platform decides it needs a different model to support its business needs.

It really seems like there should be a middle ground: my ideas get published while ensuring your business survives. Right now, the two are independent functions.

I've been waiting for this for a while. Although git is my preferred method of working, for people who aren't technical and who just can't do stuff from terminal, I think this is a great alternative.

The cool thing is you can still use Git with this approach. See: http://bigtrapeze.com/2012/08/25/using-google-drive-as-a-git...

Or you could just use Bitbucket haha

My favorite part is that the page illustrates how it was created. Kind of a "This is my life" story.

(the url in the image at the bottom is the url of the page itself)

Is the URL of that document pretty reliable or is it not really meant for the long term? I'm thinking of whether there would be issues with using a custom domain for it.

I currently host a static website from S3, and I still have to pay a couple of bucks for the traffic. Sounds like this would be completely free.

Check out GitHub Pages for hosting static content for free. I use it for all my statically-generated sites now, and it's been great other than the couple times GitHub went down.

So this implies that it would be delivered over Google CDN, e.g. from a network close to requesting location?

Sorry guys but I think GitHub/Bitbucket beat you to the punch, not to mention all the PaaS apps out there.

Hosts more than css, html, js (for output)

Custom domains

Collaboration via revision control.

I see zero reason to ever use this when there are so many betters tools out there .

Other people are doing this too? Cool. More options to choose from. And I think that's kind of the point. Marketplaces work best when there is choice.

Well, sometimes arrogance and being small minded does blind you to certain things.

Like how if you're an office manager and you finally got used to using Docs for word processing and spreadsheets but now wanted to make a webpage to send out a message about the office party, this would be a good option.

Or if you're the outreach coordinator at your local church group and having been using Gmail all the time to chat and setup group communication for awhile this would be really easy for you to get started at making a webpage to talk about the recent retreat.

Or if you're a high school student and you wanted to let people in your neighborhood know that you're a go-getter that's capable of walking their dogs, this would be a good option to make a webpage out of.

This is more for those that switched over from Microsoft Office world and it's more of a direct competitor to grab use cases for Apple/iWeb.

Your right I never though of end users just publishing docs straight to html, I wasn't being arrogant, small minded probably.

as if Git can be used by all people..am sure except us developers, all others would prefer Google Drive over Git anytime..

Seems to be working fine, but I'd honestly never use it. It's pretty difficult to do anything other than very simple HTML websites.

I had tried to upload my website template that I was working on that used head.js (lazyloads javascript) and it was not working correctly.

>6/10

Is that an official Google page on how to do this, or a demo you put together that Google may nix shortly? I ask mainly because a DS_Store file is visible in the directory, which strikes me as not a typical Google thing. Do they even use Mac OS for anything?

Macs are quite popular at Google, actually

I think that is a user-created page. This feature of Drive launched late last year[1] and you can find more about it from the Drive SDK[2]

[1] - http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/11/announcing-g...

[2] - https://developers.google.com/drive/publish-site

There doesn't appear to be a way to edit the files, as the owner, after they are uploaded.

i think Skydrive currently doesn't do that...they may not even have plans to implement that..

Is this sanctioned by Google?

Yes[1] - it's an extension of an extant feature of Google Cloud Storage[2]

[1] https://developers.google.com/drive/publish-site

[2] https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/website-configura...

This does not appear to be an official Google site or suggestion. Personally, I'd use them for my cat's blog and that's about it. Google could pull the plug on this at anytime

Good advice, since they already did pull the plug for a similar publication method in Google Docs

Seems pretty offficially supported in this blog post from Nov 2012 http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/announcin...

and the associated drive SDK for publishing web content https://developers.google.com/drive/publish-site

He probably means in the same way that iGoogle was officially supported.

In that if its unpopular or not to Google's expectation, they'll kill it all of a sudden.

They could do that with any of their services.

github work fine for me to host my static html,css,js pages.

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