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How do you publish a text file on Google OS?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, September 27, 2007
16 years ago7,773 views

How does one write/ publish a custom, publicly crawlable text file on the "Google OS", using just a browser + Google Account and no third-party accounts or tools?

For instance, I'm able to create a Google Docs spreadsheet and publish it as text, but it's not permitted to crawl it due to the robots.txt.

On the other hand Google project hosting allows hosting but needs a subversion client.

What other ways are there?

Luke [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

You could upload the txt file to Google Pages...

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Write the content in Google Docs, save it as text and upload the file to Google Pages.

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Luke: That would require more than a browser and Google account...you'd have to save the file to your local drive first.

What about creating the file in Google Pages itself? I can't remember if you can rename the file from html to txt.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

<< Write the content in Google Docs, save it as text and upload the file to Google Pages. >>

I'm guessing that saving a file to your hard drive is not allowed. For example, here at work we have an Internet cafe with shared PCs without access to save files to the hard drive. It should be possible to do it without needing to saving anything on a storage device.

I'm still thinking but here's what I've been trying:

* Changing the file name of a Google Pages created page to file.txt – this doesn't work, even with a .txt extension the content is served as HTML and you can't remove all the HTML code anyway

* Emailing a text attachment to email-to-blog in Blogger – it seems Blogger publishes the contents of the file rather than upload it as an attachment and link it

* Emailing a document in text format from Google Docs to Gmail – it seems it only allows .doc, .rtf, .pdf and .odt formats though

dpneal [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

can you email to google groups? that supports files now...

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

You can... but it only attaches them to the post / message for download rather than adding them to the Files section.

However, if Google indexes files with a "content-disposition: attachment" header, that might still work!

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

And here's the proof that Google does index files with a "content-disposition: attachment" header:

[site:groups.google.com/group inurl:attach inurl:txt]
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agroups.google.com%2Fgroup+inurl%3Aattach+inurl%3Atxt

So the question is now how to create and receive a text file by email without saving it to the hard drive first...

dpneal [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

guess that's a job for gdrive....

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

> I'm guessing that saving a file to your
> hard drive is not allowed.

For my specific use-case that would have been OK actually, but it's interesting to find the other ways...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

PS: Thanks for all the answers. I didn't realize it was possible using Google Page Creator. This was very useful for a chapter for Google Office Hacks.

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Google Base is probably the answer. You can import the file published in Spreadsheets, but it takes a lot to upload it. And you need to have a valid (or something that looks like a valid) item.

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