Ways to share anything with anyone with Gdrive public HTML hosting!

by +Cesar Anton 

@reicek

Looking for sharing your files with the world, but just sharing Gdocs isn't good enough for you? Don't worry! Google Drive has a special service called public HTML hosting, which allows you to transform any Gdrive folder into a virtual "Web Server"! When others access the page, they see a list with all the folders public content (by default everything), if they click on the file, if it's not something Gdrive can open directly (like images or docs) the users browser will simply download the file.

Let's see an example, this Gdrive Folder contains a .rar file, since Gdrive cannot open this kind of files directly, when you click on it, your browser will start downloading it:

https://googledrive.com/host/0B_RClkFMLkcpdXlOZWdwM2JuWUk/

You can even put it inside an iframe to show its contents directly on a website!



Sweet huh? The best is that the content keeps in sync with your Gdrive, so if you change your content, the public version will be instantly updated! You can even host webpages! just throw some index.html file on that folder and when the users open the folders URL, they will receive the content of index.html instead of the default folder view.

But that's not all you can do... if instead of using the folder's URL you point to a specific file, you can use the URL to share that specific file with someone, and when they open it, the file will start downloading automatically (except for docs, html and images)... but hey, that's not the cool part! you can use this specific URLs to stream multimedia content for you webpages! You don't even need to worry about a player, you can use HTML5 video or audio tags and show your content straight away!

This works even for large videos, here is a video of one of my cats (he's name is Volt) playing zelda:


Right on huh? But no, you cannot have my cat... but you can host your pet's video and share it with us in the comments section at the bottom of this article!

To make things easier, I also added a copy of a very nice HTML5 video converter for windows (there is a version for Mac OS users on the authors site), it does a great job getting your video ready for some HTML5 action.

Just remember, you are responsible of what you share on the internet, so be careful with how you use this tool, never distribute proprietary material like music, movies or videoclips.

Happy coding!