[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a platform to publish my Google Docs...
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Show HN: I made a platform to publish my Google Docs files as blogs
Author : lewisjoe
Score : 123 points
Date : 2021-05-13 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hexo.press)
(TXT) w3m dump (hexo.press)
| kodah wrote:
| This is a badass project, especially for one regarded as a time
| filler. Congrats!
| joshu wrote:
| i have been hoping for this for a long time:
| http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/12/blogging-tools
| redeux wrote:
| I went to the GitHub repo you included at the bottom of the page
| and I noticed you don't include a license. Without a license
| everyone who clones, forks, or otherwise uses you code is
| violating your copyright. Maybe that's your intention, but if not
| you should consider adding an appropriate license that defines
| what use of your code is and isn't allowed.
| adawg4 wrote:
| Lol you could live edit blogs made with hexopress using
| Hitsnag.com too add info to them on the go! This is really cool.
| rajasimon wrote:
| This is very nice. Once again I am happy that another Django
| project especially OSS noticed in HN
| sam_4675 wrote:
| Small typo:
|
| Not everytime you have a brilliant idea,
|
| =>
|
| Now everytime you have a brilliant idea,
| RupertWiser wrote:
| I've been using this approach for my blog and I've been loving it
| :) Seems like Google Docs for blogs is a bit of a golden ticket
| to the front page on hackernews
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23134101).
|
| I'm a bit hesitant about using an external service for something
| like this however. I just have a cronjob running on the server I
| use for my website and that's worked out pretty well.
| tornupinside wrote:
| Very cool, love writing docs in google, but find sharing it out
| somewhat lackluster. Couple q's
|
| 1. What sort of SEO is there/do you plan to add? 2. I onboarded
| through the product @rob, and then moved a doc to the hexopress
| folder in drive. How long does it take to refresh?
| lewisjoe wrote:
| It doesn't refresh by itself. Once you finish writing your doc,
| you have to sign into hexopress once and click refresh blog
| once.
| luke2m wrote:
| Looks great! I'm a "hackers with terminals and gits" but may
| recommend this.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Hi, I was following the project for a while but lost track.
| What's changed since 4 years ago?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857137
| lewisjoe wrote:
| I lost the domain name (https://hexopress.com), but got a
| better one: it's https://hexo.press now
|
| Feature wise, the web UI now lets you write a small "About"
| piece that gets populated in your blog's sidebar.
|
| Google Analytics support is something I added sometime later,
| but you might want to take a loot at that one too :)
| tito wrote:
| Curious if anyone has seen something like this to publish
| Mailchimp newsletters on the web. Mailchimp's "archive" page is
| weak.
|
| I have a weekly newsletter on carbon removal, published on
| Mailchimp. My site [1] starts with a script that pulls from the
| Mailchimp API, compiles pages and an archive, and deploys on
| vercel. Plus some static files for homepage/header/footer are
| pulled in.
|
| [1] https://tito.co
| lewisjoe wrote:
| Can't you do that with a simple zappier integration? Just
| thinking out loud. When I wrote hexo.press I also wanted to
| make a full-featured CMS with Google Drive as the backend, but
| then I realized a lot of this can be achieved with Zapier and
| can be done generically as well - adaptable for Microsoft
| OneDrive, Zoho Workdrive or Google Drive
|
| Did you already try Zapier?
| tito wrote:
| I adore Zapier! But how would I use it in this case? I can
| imagine triggering with a new Mailchimp campaign, but where
| would it post to?
| xNeil wrote:
| You could set up a Zapier integration with Ghost
| (ghost.org). Use Zapier to publish every Mailchimp
| newsletter as a Ghost article maybe? Hope I helped.
| pxtail wrote:
| There is pretty well known static site generator https://hexo.io/
| At first I thought that name similarity indicates that you are
| using it somewhere as part of pipeline but apparently not.
| zffr wrote:
| Just curious, how does the syntax highlighting work in the demo
| blog?
| lewisjoe wrote:
| Ah, I haven't mentioned it anywhere. You can also drop .md
| files in your "hexopress" folder in Google drive. These will
| show up as posts as well :)
|
| I use this to write posts that need code-blocks and also, I
| love markdown!
| zffr wrote:
| Not sure if it would be possible, but I would love a way to
| do WYSIWYG code-block editing directly in google docs
|
| I tried the code-blocks google docs extension which looked
| right in my doc, but that didn't seem to work with hexopress
| zhvihti wrote:
| Users who have enabled Advanced Protection will not be able to
| use your service ("Error 400: policy_enforced"). Maybe add a note
| about that.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Whoa neat, I only skimmed through the demo but are there ways to
| add images?
| tpmx wrote:
| Was curious how the document conversion happened: It's using
| Pandoc to convert .docx files downloaded from Google Docs into
| markdown files.
|
| Hadn't seen Pandoc before. It's a Haskell library/cli that
| supports a large number of input/output document formats in
| varying degrees of completeness: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc
| tyingq wrote:
| Curious if you'll be affected by _" Google Docs will now use
| canvas based rendering"_.
|
| https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...
|
| Discussed yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| From looking at the code, I think it's basically just
| downloading the relevant google docs files as docx (or markdown
| if the file's just .md) and converting it into octopress, so I
| don't think it will matter.
|
| Source:
| https://github.com/joelewis/hexopress/blob/55f55c39136ef301f...
| codazoda wrote:
| This comment caught my eye because I use a lot of markdown.
| What do you mean about downloading the file as markdown if
| it's just an .md?
|
| I haven't ever created a .md in Google Docs and I don't see a
| way to download one.
|
| Edit: After looking at the code, I think the comment applies
| to Google Drive and not Google Docs. I only use Google Drive
| via the web interface and it's a bit of a pain to "create" an
| md file via that interface.
| lewisjoe wrote:
| I deleted my previous comment since it was irrelevant. Yes,
| you are right. I wanted to write markdown files and make
| them as posts. So I wrote that piece of code that, looks
| for md files as well, in addition to Google Doc files - for
| publishing as posts.
|
| Helps me write code-blocks heavy posts in markdown directly
| in Google Drive, using markdown extensions. Google Docs is
| yet to support code blocks and by now I doubt they ever
| will :(
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| Yeah I agree, it really sucks that really basic things
| like equations, code-blocks, and captions in images
| aren't supported in Google Docs, it's an incredible
| dealbreaker.
| hooloovoo_zoo wrote:
| Google slides doesn't even support vector graphics. Given
| the tech-savvy nature of people at Google, I've long
| suspected that nobody there actually uses Google Docs.
| murkle wrote:
| That's not quite true. You can import EMF (and SVG with
| some effort)
|
| https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/115814/
| how...
| hooloovoo_zoo wrote:
| I've never found any of these kinds of approaches to
| actually work; I always end up with a rasterized image
| that I could have gotten by just taking a screenshot.
| [deleted]
| lewisjoe wrote:
| Author here! :) No it won't. I was the one who submitted that
| piece to HN, and the first thing I was worried was how it will
| break hexo.press.
|
| Apparently, only extensions are affected and hexo.press is a
| service that uses Google's meta APIs, which are not affected.
| amelius wrote:
| Funny, Medium spent all this time working on (and blogging about)
| the perfect editor, and you simply use Google Docs.
| BMorearty wrote:
| Very nice. Recently I was thinking about doing this myself. Now I
| don't have to! Yay procrastination.
| keehun wrote:
| Congratulation on shipping! The experience was flawless and
| quick.
|
| Two things I noticed which I hope you will consider fixing:
|
| - It was trivially easy to expose the user's google/gmail address
| by typing in a random URL within the user's blog. The 404 page
| exposes the user's email address. [0] Probably better to have
| some UUID-email mapping that is secret.
|
| - When I clicked "Delete Account/Blog", the application did not
| remove itself from Google's "Apps with access to your account"
| page and was still showing up as an active integration.
|
| [0]: https://i.imgur.com/PG8Em4S.png
| lewisjoe wrote:
| Thank you for pointing this out.
|
| #1 - I'll deactivate debug mode ASAP and the 404 page shouldn't
| have any extra info henceforth.
|
| #2 - Yes, it's better to revoke google's scopes as well. I'll
| work on this one.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| Django debug is quite dangerous to expose online. Are you
| hosting this on your own computers?
| lewisjoe wrote:
| > It was trivially easy to expose the user's google/gmail
| address by typing in a random URL within the user's blog.
|
| This one is fixed now!
| raybb wrote:
| This is pretty awesome! If anyone wants something similar but for
| documentation check this out: https://github.com/nytimes/library
| spamalot159 wrote:
| This is pretty cool! There is a whole wave of young people that
| are using Chromebooks and therefore Google Docs at school every
| day. They will be most comfortable with writing in Gdocs. I could
| see a product like this becoming very popular.
|
| I mostly used MS Word to write essays at school growing up and to
| this day my ideas flow best when I have Word open on a desktop
| computer.
| ecesena wrote:
| This is amazing! Do you have a plan to support subfolders?
|
| I'd love to use something like this for docs instead of a blog.
|
| I wrote about my setup here: https://0x0ece.medium.com/docs-for-
| an-open-source-project-b7...
|
| I manually manage the md files inside my repo and publish via
| jekyll+github pages. But I do most of the actual
| writing/commenting work in gdocs, so automating gdoc -> md is
| just awesome!
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(page generated 2021-05-13 23:01 UTC)