Sunday, March 1, 2015

Publishing a Website for Free with Google Drive

This will be a short intro on publishing a website using Google Drive. The cost for everything will be free which is always nice. I think this is a great way for students to show off their projects while they're looking for a job and might not have access to free hosting.


Prerequisites:

A free Google Drive account.

A text editor. Notepad is fine, but I prefer Sublime Text 3.

HTML knowledge. Learning this is beyond the scope of this tutorial, but I have found a great list of resources for those wishing to start out. 

Internet browser for testing. I'm using Chrome in my example.


Now, let's begin getting our page/site online:


Make a new folder in Google Drive and named it: Site

Within this folder, make a new text document and save it as: index.html

For the purposes of this, I used the following code within my index.html file:


<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<title>TEST PAGE</title>
<body>
<body bgcolor="66C7D4">
<h1>This is a TEST</h1>
<p1>This is a test of building a webpage and deploying it from Google Drive. This is a great alternative to paid options if you're looking to set up a basic site to show people something.</p1>
</body>
</html>



Use this code to test or place in your own .html and JavaScript files.

Go into Google Drive now and check the box next to your Site folder.

At the top of the page, click Share.

Click Advanced in the bottom right corner of the sharing box.

Click Change.

Chose On - Public on the web and click Save.

Note: Before closing the box, make sure you go to index.html or the homepage of your site and copy the document ID from the sharing URL that Google gives you. 


My document ID for this tested looked like this: 0B5qOIaafmEh3bXk5aVMyZ0xQdlU

The link to my example test page is: 





You can see my basic page is online and working hosted through Google Drive.




There are a few downsides like the page link. It's not the easiest to tell people the link without writing it down or linking to it from somewhere. j3hr3i4j3i4jksic3 - strings like that could be hard to remember lol.


Play around with it and see what you can come up with!
       


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