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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature.

Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing).

In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files, since visiting an html page in a browser serves that file and relative links are preserved.

I guess it's a losing value proposition, but it sure would be nice.

It's unfortunate the original demo video was lost to time. I remember how astounding it was.

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> It's unfortunate the original demo video was lost to time. I remember how astounding it was.

Is this the video you're thinking of?

https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...

Yes. Holy crap, you actually found the original.

There was a recording of a presentation Drew gave later on about Dropbox, but it wasn't as good. This is definitely the original.

Thanks for the memories!

> right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item

You have described Google Drive.

Not quite; it's not a direct link to the item.

Put <img src="foo.jpg"> into an html file, alongside foo.jpg. In the original Dropbox, if you opened a link to the html file, you'd see a webpage that successfully rendered foo.jpg. So you could use it as a static file host.

It was such a nice feature too, but very easily and quickly abused.

> What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing).

That still works for me, when replacing dl=0 with dl=1 at the end of the URL (dl = download).

Unfortunately that downloads the file directly, rather than displaying it in browser, so it's not a very nice way of linking screenshots to someone. The other use case is an html file that contains references to images within the same folder, like <img src="foo.png">. You'd want it to display in the browser, not download the html page as a file.

Ah, I see. But that usage is exactly why they don’t permit it anymore, it’s been abused too much. People were hosting whole sites on Dropbox, that’s not what it’s for.

pcloud with the public folder works well. I've uploaded a few html ebooks with relative routing and it has worked fine.

Where's the public folder? I tried uploading an html file but can't get a direct link to it: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ6NzI5ZoJ0CG3nPXqBF...

https://www.pcloud.com/help/general-help-center/what-is-the-...

Thanks very much!

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