Show HN: Cloudstitch – Build and share spreadsheet-powered web content | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cloudstitch – Build and share spreadsheet-powered web content

cloudstitch.io

84 pointseob31 comments

Congrats on shipping!

First, I totally understand what it's like to ship an MVP. When we launched our SaaS service we didn't even have a way to rebill our subscribers, knowing we had a month to figure that out. So add this feedback to the end of your list because I'm sure you've got your hands full!

- I didn't realize at first that the Google Doc and example page were live. I thought they were just screenshots. There are probably some design affordances you can use to make this clearer.

- You don't have a call to action above the fold. In fact, you have a green "register" button but it's part of your example. Similarly, Log In could just be a link, giving more attention to Sign Up in the header.

- I think "projects" is a vague name. There are words that can probably do a better job explaining what these are. Themes? Packages?

All in all, great job. It's rare to see so much documentation on launch day!

I also did not realize the google doc was live.

Yeah. Saw this comment and was like "REALLY?" and then I tried it.

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement, encoderer. All very helpful. We know there's a lot we can do to improve the landing page (well, every page).

Totally feel you re: billing. At a certain point, you just have to kick it out the door, and some things are bound to be stapled on afterward. :)

I rolled my own version of this to manage the online menu for a restaurant. The restaurant manager updates a Google Spreadsheet with the current menu and item pricing. I pull that data and render either an HTML version for the web, or a PDF version for printing. Works very well.

I don't suppose you have the source for that up on github or anything do you? It sounds interesting.

I don't. I'll see if I can pull it together and get it online.

This is something we've been hearing from a lot of folks -- spreadsheet-driven websites are actually a really popular practice that we think should get more love and attention. I'd love to help you package that site you made for cloning and reuse on Cloudstitch so others can use it, too.

- Ted from Cloudstitch [ted@cloudstitch.io]

Have you thought of doing a spreadsheet-powered UI for desktop or internal web applications?

I know of one crazy guy who replaced an entire IT department back in 2000 that was dedicated to tweaking Java UIs. He built his own spreadsheet-powered UI builder and then had the business people add their own buttons/formulas. This worked especially well because it was a financial business.

Absolutely -- there's a whole interesting world of inside-the-firewall applications of this. Enterprise-style programming certainly has an important role to play, but we're pretty bullish on the role that lighter-weight solutions can provide as a compliment.

Isn't that VBA?

I did a Google Spreadsheet powered mail merge, printing N copies of a document with a different name and address subbed in, using an HTML page.

I know this election survey page was all backed by Google Spreadsheet, too: http://tritag.ca/election2014/ I'm not the author, but I understand it made it very easy to cut and paste in candidates' answers on the specific issues from a survey which was circulated by email.

Very much like these two:

https://assembly.com/gridspree (github hosted. a bit more plug and play in style. I did write a bit of code for this)

https://plugins.jquery.com/sheetrock/ (just source for putting on your server)

www.cellmaster.com.au (mine)

It scares me when I see a SAAS thing with no pricing page. Anyone have an idea of what this costs?

Hi skrowl --

We know and understand your hesitation. It's coming this week. We'll have a free tier that we're aiming to make pretty broad in capability.

I could possibly use service like this. I have a RSS reader on Sheets.

No forced TLS, and when I manually enter https most of the resources try to load over http. c'mon, you've done the hard part of getting TLS, now you just need to make your home page aware.

EDIT: when I sign up it POSTs my password IN THE CLEAR. what year are we in?

Hi finnn -- we're on it!

While you're getting it brought up to current security standards, may I suggest not using GoDaddy for anything, including as a certificate authority, and fixing the issues with your actual SSL configuration (https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=buttstitch.io)

EDIT: Here's a handy guide to configuring your SSL https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generat...

Buttstitch?

Fuck! Correct link: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=cloudstitch.i...

+1 for cloud2butt!

Awesome project! Just wish I could see the pricing...

Very interesting!

I will be keenly following how your website and sites made with it are crawled, indexed and ranked by Google, Bing and other Search Engines.

A few years ago this kind of content would have been completely invisible to all search, making it very bad for SEO, but Google is stepping up their game in crawling Javascript/AJAX driven content.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acloudstitch.io

Thanks andrenotgiant!

We're keeping a close eye on the SEO implications of this approach. Even with Google's snapshotting the page post-Javascript execution, I think there's still value in offering pre-rendering, e.g. to reduce latency.

This is good stuff. There is also a SaaS offering to do this for mobile apps. It's called AppSheet [1] and they let you create iOS and Android apps from spreadsheets -- Google Sheets or Excel.

Disclaimer: I don't work for them but I do happen to know the founder and the team.

[1] https://www.appsheet.com/

Hi everyone, Ted from Cloudstitch here. Thanks for kicking the tires and giving feedback.

We're particularly interested in hearing what domains you might be interested in using this for. We're going to be building out as many reusable projects as we can in the coming months, and if there is strong interest for some over others, we'd love to hear it!

heyo

This is pretty cool. Nice work!

Thank you!

Is an API planned or doesn't that make sense?

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