Looking for a free and simple way to get a basic site up? Here are two webapps that can help. Both DropPages.com and Pancake.io use a shared Dropbox folder to host your web pages, making creating and editing your pages very quick.
Pancake is the simpler and more basic of the two services. Once you’ve given Pancake permission to create a Pancake folder in your Dropbox, all you have to do is create a plain text file (or HTML, Markdown, PDF or Microsoft Office file) in the folder. Pancake adds a viewer to that shared public folder so visitors can view the files in their browser. You can use Pancake’s Javascript snippet for your site to embed in another website or just link directly to your Pancake.io site (the URLs look a little awkward now, but the developers say a custom domain name option will be coming soon). You can get started with Pancake.io in minutes, really, and you don’t need to know HTML to format the text files for your web pages appropriately (see the Markdown cheat sheet). If you want to edit your pages, just do that on your computer and, thanks to Dropbox magic, the site will be quickly updated.
DropPages works similarly but adds a few different features, such as website themes, friendly URLs (yourname.droppages.com), auto-generation of navigational elements (so all your pages in the DropPages folder are linked), and custom domain names (you can use IWantMyName.com to buy a custom domain and point it at DropPages or configure the CNAME record at your domain registrar to do that; a custom domain and up to 1GB of space costs 5 pounds a month). Pages are formatted using Markdown, but you can also use HTML.
Note that with both services, you’re subject to Dropbox limits on data transfers. For free users, it’s 10GB per day and for Pro, 250GB. Users whose Dropbox public links go over these limits will be automatically suspended. So these webapps may be really cool for hosting a small site (perhaps something you just share with friends or co-workers), but not for a major website.
Pancake.io [via How-To Geek]
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