Show HN: HexoPress – a blog that syncs with your Google Docs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HexoPress – a blog that syncs with your Google Docs

hexopress.com

44 pointslewisjoe32 comments

I think you've something bigger here than you realize. :-) If you would indeed:

1) introduce some opportunity for others to write stylesheets;

2) support custom domains,

then I would expect something like this to really take off.

I see many advantages: Not all kind of Wordpress plugins that have to be checked or maintained. Not explaining what can be adjusted, what not. Having a very simple user interface for people (Google docs) that just works. I foresee also some disadvantages, especially about customization: from SEO, to footers, contact page, etc.

Thank you! Regarding customizations, things like SEO, custom footers & pages are in fact very much possible. It's just that I didn't want to put in a lot of effort, with my itch being the only validation :)

I'll keep working on it, focussing on customization options :)

The name is similar to the Hexo blog platform what may cause some confusion. [1]

[1] https://hexo.io/

I agree. It was in fact my first thought that it was associated with Hexo.

Didn't see that coming!

I was about to buy a domain named - http://hexo.press, which would have been a bigger bummer.

Hrm. You have my attention. Is there a demo blog up somewhere I could look at and does this support custom blog themes and post templating yet?

Thanks! Here's mine - http://hexopress.com/@joe.

Nope, I haven't started concentrating on making it all that customizable, except for a few basics. It's in the roadmap.

Wordpress also recently came up with the add-on to have your Google Docs saved up as blog posts. I see parallel here.

Interesting idea.

Yes. Comparatively speaking, there's this tiny little difference in perspective.

HexoPress offers a complete sync between a folder on your Google Drive and your blog. Wordpress doesn't. It just takes a given post from Google Docs, when you are done with it and puts it into its database. That's pretty much it.

Makes sense.

I'm not sure why I would use "your service" to do this (blog on my Google, only to have the document show up somewhere else). I see value in a service if such connector is available within Google for me to keep it within Google. Nothing wrong with your service, and it is a fantastic idea, but just saying. I think this idea is more feasible if it is available as an independent entity. I find it strange that neither Microsoft, nor Google cared to think about it, given that a word processor is a natural fit.

Good perspective. Wordpress is excellent at what it does. It makes complete sense, to go for it to do some serious blogging.

This project is for the rest of us, lazy bloggers who've gotten used to using Google Docs as a personal scratchpad and would want to blog right from there!

Thanks for asking. I've added a link to the demo blog, right on the homepage. Hope that should help others as well.

Great idea - if I could change the style and some additional customizations, I would probably pay a couple bucks a month. Actually looking to start up a blog soon and starting to look around at the options.

Very neat idea. Btw, don't forget to add .DS_Store to your .gitignore file.

Oops! Thanks. Will add it.

This is great. I just published my first post. Its been about 15 minutes. So far haven't seen it coming through. Is there a process that kicks every sometime?

It looks like you have to click the refresh button to get it to display.

Yes, that worked! Thanks.

Thanks for trying out.

I'll revisit the UI, to be more explicit about clicking the refresh blog button after writing.

Any support for inserted images in docs? Just seeing placeholders currently with image dimensions.

Yes, very soon. Will be working on it, right away.

Done. HexoPress now supports images from your Google Doc! Go ahead. Login & refresh the blog - http://hexopress.com/login

So where will my blogs be published?

Once you sign up, you'll have your blog served at hexopress.com/@<the_username_you_choose>

Any plans on allowing subdomains so people can use their own domains? Wouldn't mind a hexopress footer (similar to how PostHaven would do it) on the site in exchange.

Yes, certainly. I'm short of prior experience generating dynamic subdomains. That's probably why I didn't put it in the first cut.

Yeah, if you could support custom domains, I'd definitely use this. Also, looks like we could self-host from your github code? By the way, you've come up with quite a brilliant, simple, and efficient idea.

I'll figure how to get that done!

The README there, isn't complete. I'll pack the README with more details on getting it to work on dev/prod machines. Hopefully, by evening :)

It looks quite cool. How do you plan to monetize it into surviving?

Thanks! Regarding monetizing it, I have no plans yet. On doing the math, looks like it can take up to a 1000 users, before it costs me anything significant.

If at all it goes north of thousand users(which is a really long way!), I'd give it a thought :)

This is great! Is there any way to update the stylesheet?

Glad that you liked it. Updating stylesheet is not possible as of now. But, I'll be working on making a lot of it customizable, going forward :)

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