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Show HN: Harp Platform now available to the public

blog.harp.io

48 pointssintaxi27 comments

I really, really would love to give this a try but am totally turned off by the requested "read and modify everything" Dropbox permissions. Although the Harp application does a really good job explaining the limitations of the Dropbox permissions API after a denial during the Dropbox authorization step, I'm still not comfortable. I hope it's true that OP is working with Dropbox to improve the situation as stated :)

Same here. Have a new project I'm starting next week that this would be perfect with -- a small site with several collaborators that's not worthy of a full CMS, and everyone involved loves and uses Dropbox already.

But Dropbox is my lifeblood -- the most-used tool in my toolbox. I have everything important in there. There is simply no way I can grant access to full thing, even if you promise to "play nice". It's simply too risky.

Fix that, and you'll be getting $10/mo. from me in no time.

maybe I'm missing something but why not just signup for another dropbox account and use that one for this instead?

As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong, please!) there's no easy way to "switch" Dropbox accounts on your computer, is there?

Yes, this is one option to work around Dropbox’s limited permission options here. You can create another Dropbox account and link that to Harp Platform. Then, share your application folder with your main Dropbox account and match the directory structure (put it inside harp.io/apps/), and continue using the Harp Platform normally.

Ohhh! Gotcha! I'll do that!

This is something you can easily do. By creating a second account and sharing it with your primary account you can essentially create a sand-box.

By sharing with your primary account there is no need to have a second Dropbox client or switch clients.

Hi there, Harp Op here.

When we started out building Harp we wanted to provided an unparalleled user experience and not compromise on features. Collaboration was a must, after all software is written by people and teams.

Asking for full access was not something we wanted to do, but something that was necessary to get that feature and make Harp Platform a more compelling.

The Harp Platform is not build on Dropbox, it is build with Dropbox support and we can introduce other methods for syncing files and content. Github support is will underway.

What you've built looks great and I totally understand your rationale. It was just _scary_ to see that pop up. Did not think of the method described by @fjabre's comment and its children though (one of your sibling comments). Maybe that could be mentioned on the warning page in the Harp app after a denial from the initial Dropbox authorization too?

I still think that the harp product (brand?) is all over the place. From what I've seen, harp is all of these things:

- A command line utility for creating a preprocessing-enabled server

- A static site generator like jekyll

- A "front-end publishing platform" for Dropbox

This leads to poor understanding of exactly what "Harp" is and what it helps you accomplish.

Oooh, and also a kind of beer!

It's mainly between HarpJS.com and harp.io, where on HarpJS there's a command line utility that works like a static site generator, and on harp.io it's hosted. I think it works pretty well that way, just like Wordpress has a self-hosted platform as well as a hosted one.

Harp doesn't aim to be a static site generator, quite the opposite I feel.

It just allows you to throw (language/technology-agnostic) files in a directory and serve them. Dropbox seems like a good match for this.

I can understand the confusion. Best to think of it like this, "Harp" is a static web server with built in preprocessing. "Harp Platform" is a service for running Harp apps in production.

- "Command line" - happens to be the way you access the web server.

- "Generating static assets" is just a feature of the web server.

- "Dropbox integration" is just a feature of the platform.

Hope that helps clear things up.

Why do the build process (preprocessing) on the server?

so that non-devs can do edits via editing, dropbox syncs, push using web UI, and have the magic happen w/o needing devtools everywhere.

Not really, they still have to have node, npm, and the harp cli installed to use it locally. And if you're going through the work of doing all that, why not just do the build step on the client.

Should be "boat". Freudian slip!

"...and the community gets a bloat load of terrific open source libraries along the way."

Looks good. Wish it wasn't tied to Dropbox though. I'd almost definitely use it if I could work out of my own WebDAV server.

Well, good news for you, you can run the harp server on your own hosting! However, at that point I would just use the static site generator that I am accustomed to (Wintersmith).

Oh, very nice!

I'm waiting until Dropbox pulls a Twitter-move and disallows third party integration.

I don't see how that would make any sense. Why would they do that? To me, it seems like Dropbox wants to sell storage to people, the more things that plug into Dropbox, the more storage they sell.

Twitter made a bunch of moves to limit third party integration because they need to control the channel so they can sell ads to be displayed on the platform, and display promoted accounts and tweets.

Obviously we don’t want this to happen, and I personally don’t think it will, but the Harp Platform has been built with this possibility in mind. The Harp Platform isn’t built upon Dropbox, we chose to make Dropbox one part of our interface.

"How to be an absolute zero when it comes to SEO"

Can you elaborate?

Congrats!

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