Liveblog: My website in a Dropbox

Liveblog:

My website in a Dropbox

Sat, May 23, 2015 at 11:23 AM by Dave Winer ☮.

I wanted to mark a milestone. I finally have a web server running out of a Dropbox folder. I tried doing this with Apache a few years ago, but there was something about how Apache worked that drove Dropbox crazy. Or vice versa.
Now I have my own web server, built out of Node.js core packages. It's really fast and reliable, and I pretty much know exactly what it's doing. There was never a problem with Dropbox. We just read the files from the server. We update our own stats files, but that doesn't seem to be too much for Dropbox to handle.
- It is using up a lot of CPU cycles on the server, according to the Top command, so I'm thinking about turning Dropbox off when I'm not actively developing.
Why it's so cool -- all my tools work with the filesystem. It's even more widely supported than Git.
I like this way of doing sites because there's no difference between the original content and the stuff that's being served. If I want to edit one of the files in my website, I just open it in an editor, make the changes and save. It's like having the server on my machine, without actually having the server on my machine.
The server is called PagePark. Of all my latest tools, it's my favorite. I love tweaking it, adding little shortcuts. Things that make it work really well for the kind of content I serve.