Google Drive serves up Web Pages

I was listening to the This Week in Google podcast the other day. They talked about the possibility of serving up a static website from a Google Drive folder.

So I looked up the LifeHacker article but I needed a look at the Google Apps Developer Blog for the details. I got confused and started thinking I would need to use an API to set up the website from a folder.

But looking at the URLs, I guessed that when you share the folder with the web pages and make it public, the hash value taken from the shared url for the folder can be used to create a web url.

More Details

So some detail. First create a folder in your Google Drive that will hold your html files, images javascript etc. Make sure you create an index.html which is the entry point.

Share the folder, using the “Public on the web” option. The link share looks something like this:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0dQc5h3FWiTcVo3bjlqSGdEeVk&usp=sharing

Looking back the Google Developer Blog, when I changed the URL to the format

https://googledrive.com/host/0B0dQc5h3FWiTcVo3bjlqSGdEeVk

I got a website :).