Foldocs

Hello, Foldocs

2026-10-22T12:00:00+02:00

Foldocs turns a shared folder of documents into a website. You write in Google Docs or Word, share the folder with a link, and a few minutes after every change the site follows: pages from documents, sections from folders, photo pages from photos.

This site is the first one in public, and made by it. Every page you read here is a document in one Google Drive folder, which you can see beside the site; every page links to its own document. The same folder also makes this site as a blog and as a folder tree.

Why

Because the place where people write is rarely the place where their website is. Foldocs closes that gap without adding a system to learn: no editor, no database, no plug-ins, no logins. What it builds are plain web pages, fast and accessible, that any web server can host.

Where to start

The Guide shows everything Foldocs does, one page at a time
The Examples show how others could set up their folder
To run it yourself, see Get started

What's next

OneDrive and Dropbox as sources, and a hosted version for anyone who would rather not run a server.

Folders become sections

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

Every folder at the top of the shared folder, except profile, is a section: a row on the home page, a page of its own and an item in the menu. This site has five: Guide, Examples, Photos, Updates and Get started.

An example

📁 My site
- 📁 profile: not a section; see The profile folder
- 📁 1 Work: a row, a page at /work/, a menu item
  - 📁 Clients: a subsection, at /work/clients/
    - 📁 2026: one level deeper
- 📁 2 Writing: the second row, at /writing/

The rules

You do	The site does
Add a folder at the top	A new row, page and menu item
Put a folder in a folder	A subsection, with a link at the top of its parent's page
Start a name with a number, 1 Work	Sets the order; the number isn't shown
Write a description in Drive	Shows it as the folder's introduction
Rename a folder	Renames the menu item and the address
Delete a folder	Removes its pages, a minute later

Folders nest as deep as you like, and the breadcrumbs above every page follow them: this site's Updates has a subfolder, features. A file directly in the top folder belongs to no section and isn't shown.

Rename a folder, and the menu follows. Move a document, and its page moves with it.

Photos and images

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

A photo in a folder becomes a photo page: titled by its file name, dated by when it was taken, and captioned by its description in Drive. See Photos.

Names, dates and captions

The file	On the site
Black sand.jpg	Titled Black sand, dated by the camera
IMG_4012.jpg	No title (a camera's name means nothing); dated by the camera
1968-12-24 Earthrise.jpg	Titled Earthrise, dated 24 December 1968
A description in Drive	The caption under the photo

Photos straight from an iPhone (HEIC) work as they are, as do JPEG, PNG and WebP.

Five sizes

Every image, in a photo or a document, is made in five widths of WebP, from 480 to 2400 pixels. A phone downloads a small one, a large screen a sharp one, and nobody downloads the original. The camera's data, location included, stays out of them.

Photos and drawings

In a card, a photo fills the frame. A drawing, diagram or screenshot is recognised by its few flat colours and fitted instead, on its own background colour, so nothing is cut off. Compare the diagram on Start here with the photos here.

Make it yours

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

Every Foldocs site can look like its owner, without touching code. Put a document called Design in profile, with a table in it, and fill in what you want to change. This site's blue is set that way. Leave a cell empty, and the theme's choice stays.

Setting	Light	Dark	What it changes
Accent	#1f63d6	#6ea2ff	Links, buttons, numbers, the marks that stand out
Background			The page; panels, bands and borders follow
Text			The text; secondary text follows
Heading font			Titles and headings
Body font			Running text
UI font			Menus, labels, dates
Corners			Rounding of images, cards and buttons

Colours

Any colour, as a hex code like #1f63d6. The Dark column is for visitors whose device is in dark mode; leave it empty, and the theme's dark colours stay. Choose a background and a text colour, and the softer shades for panels, borders and secondary text follow from them.

Fonts

Any family on Google Fonts, and there are well over a thousand: type its name, or paste the link to its page. Foldocs downloads it once and serves it from your own site, so your visitors' browsers never ask Google, and the page stays fast. End with serif, sans-serif or monospace to say what shows while it loads.

Three to try

	Editorial	Technical	Warm
Accent	#9b2c2c	#0f766e	#c2410c
Background	#fbf8f3	#f8fafc	#fff7ed
Heading font	Fraunces, serif	Space Grotesk	DM Serif Display, serif
Body font	Lora, serif	Inter	Nunito
Corners	0	4px	16px

Editorial: Fraunces and Lora on warm paper, a deep red, square corners.

Technical: Space Grotesk and Inter on cool white, teal, slightly rounded.

Warm: DM Serif Display and Nunito on cream, burnt orange, soft round corners.

Copy a column into your Design document, Light cells only, and watch your site change a few minutes later. Every value is checked first: one that isn't valid is left out, and the theme's own value stays, so a typo can't break the site.

Further

The same settings work in every theme, so a new theme keeps your colours and fonts. Beyond them, a theme of your own can change anything.

What public means

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

Do	Don't
Keep drafts in another folder until they're ready	Park a draft in the site's folder
Empty the trash of anything that never belonged	Trust the trash to hide things
Share the folder as Viewer	Give the link edit rights

Everything in the folder is on the site. That is the point, and the one rule to remember.

The site doesn't lead back to the folder, unless its theme chooses to, as this one does on every page. Image addresses are built from a fingerprint of a file's ID, never the ID itself, so no one can get from an image to the original or to the folder.

A link-shared folder isn't listed anywhere. Search engines don't index it, and its address can't be guessed: only people with the link can open it.

Search, feeds and the rest

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

Found by search engines

Every page has a title (Make it yours · Foldocs), a description from its subtitle or first lines, and an address of its own (/guide/make-it-yours/). A sitemap lists every page with the day it last changed, so search engines know what is new.

Pages also describe themselves in structured data: who the site is by, which page is a post and when it was published, which is the About page, and the breadcrumbs to each. That is what rich search results are made of.

Shared well

A link pasted in a chat or a post unfolds into a preview with the page's title, description and image: its first photo, or the theme's share image. Try it with this page.

Followed by feed

The newest pages are in a feed: add the site's address to any feed reader, and every new document arrives by itself.

Readable by everyone

Meets the WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility guidelines: contrast, headings, landmarks, a skip link, a visible focus, alt text
Made for phones first, with a dark mode that follows yours
Fast: about 100 kilobytes a page, images in the size the screen needs

Out of sight while you work

While a site is a draft, one setting asks search engines to stay away, on every page.

The profile folder

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

The folder profile holds what isn't a section:

Name	Becomes
home	The home page's opening: see below
About	The About page
CV	The CV page, with a PDF of the document to download
Contact	The contact page; its first e-mail link also becomes the button in the footer
Design	Not a page: your colours and fonts, see Make it yours
Anything else	A page of its own, linked in the footer, like the Colophon
A photo	The portrait on the home page

The home document

This site's home has a Title, Your folder is your website., which is the big headline. Its Subtitle, Websites from shared folders, is the small label above it. Its first paragraph is the intro, and its first list the four topics under it. Change the document, and the home page follows.

Leave out what you don't need

No document, no page and no menu item: a site without a CV simply has none. The names work in Dutch too (Over, Over mij), and Résumé or Curriculum vitae is a CV.

From folder to site

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

A typo, fixed

At 10:00 you fix a typo in a document. At 10:01 Foldocs sees the change, and waits. At 10:05 nobody has touched the document for five minutes, so Foldocs fetches it, converts it and rebuilds what it changed. At 10:06 the page is fixed. You did nothing but type.

1. Check, every minute

Foldocs lists the folder once a minute: every file's name, place, dates and description. Nothing is downloaded unless it changed.

2. Let it rest

Google Docs saves as you type, so a changed file waits until it has been left alone for five minutes. A half-written sentence never goes online. Restarting Foldocs publishes everything at once.

3. Convert, and keep

A changed document is exported as HTML with its images, rebuilt from a short list of allowed elements, and kept in a cache with its images in five sizes. A Word file goes the same way.

4. Build

From the cache, Foldocs writes the whole site as plain files: a page per document, folder and photo, plus the feed, the sitemap and the variants. Only files that changed are rewritten.

5. Serve

Any web server can serve the result. Foldocs comes with a small container that does, and lets browsers keep images for good, as their names change with their content.

No database, no admin panel, no plug-ins: the folder is the source, the site a copy.

Start here

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

Everything you read on foldocs.com is a file in one public Google Drive folder. Foldocs checks that folder every minute, and when something changed, it makes the pages again. There is no database behind it, no admin panel, and no one logging in.

This Guide is the folder 1 Guide. Its documents are numbered (01 Start here, 02 Share a folder and so on), so it keeps that order and shows the numbers instead of dates. Every page links to its own document: try See this in Google Drive, next to the title.

The Guide, page by page

Share a folder: the only setup there is
Folders become sections: the structure of the site
Documents become pages: everything a page can hold
Photos and images: sized for every screen
The profile folder: the home page, About, CV and Contact
Dates and order: what comes first
From folder to site: what happens behind the scenes
Make it yours: your colours, your fonts, your corners
Themes: a whole new look, a logo, other languages
Search, feeds and the rest: what every site gets
What public means: the one rule to remember

Five minutes to your own

Make a folder, share it with a link, put a document called home in a folder called profile, and a document in a second folder. That is a website. Get started has the rest.

Share a folder

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

In Google Drive

Make a folder for your site, say My site.
Right-click it, choose Share, and under General access pick Anyone with the link, as Viewer.
Copy the folder's ID: the part after /folders/ in its address.
Create a free Google API key for the Drive API (the README has the three commands). The key only identifies Foldocs to Google; it opens nothing.

Google Docs and Word files both work; a Word file stays a Word file, or Drive converts it on upload.

In Nextcloud

Open the folder's sharing settings and create a share link, read only.
Add a password if you like: Foldocs takes it along.
Give Foldocs the link. No key, no account, no app to register.

Pages on Nextcloud are Word files (.docx): set Collabora or OnlyOffice to save as Word rather than OpenDocument. What a share can't do: descriptions (so no folder introductions or photo captions) and a PDF of your CV.

Check it

Open the link in a private window. What you see there, Foldocs sees: nothing more. Unshare the folder, and the site stays as it was until you share it again: Foldocs never empties a site because it can't read the folder.

Dates and order

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

The name	The page
Why I sketch	Dated by when it went into the folder
2024-05-01 Why I sketch	Dated 1 May 2024, titled Why I sketch
01 Start here	First in a numbered folder, showing 01

Edit a document on a later day, and its page says when it was updated. A date in front of a name places a piece back in time, which is handy when you move old writing over: 1968-12-24 Earthrise in Photos is dated Christmas Eve 1968.

A section shows its newest files first, unless every file in it is numbered: then it keeps that order and shows the numbers, like this Guide and Examples. Number all of them, or none.

Themes

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

Three to start from

Foldocs comes with three themes, and the same folder looks entirely different in each. This very site, in all three:

Theme	Presents the folder as	See it
Default	A personal site: a headline, then a row per section	foldocs.com
Journal	A blog: one column, newest first	journal.foldocs.com
Index	The folder tree itself	index.foldocs.com

Those two are variants: the same content, built again in another theme at the same moment, each at its own address. Handy for choosing a design with your own content in it.

Your own theme, in a few lines

A theme can extend another and change only what differs. A short file of settings and a few lines of CSS make a new look; a template of your own replaces any part of a page.

A logo: put logo.svg (and logo-dark.svg) in the theme, and it replaces the name in the header, as on this site
Icons: favicon.svg for the browser tab, apple-touch-icon.png for phone home screens
A share image: share.png, 1200 by 630, shown when someone shares a page without a picture
Analytics or a verification tag: _head.html goes into every page, as this site's privacy-friendly visitor count does
Another language: every word the templates use, from See all to the month names, is set in the theme

The README shows how. One command checks a theme's contrast, in light and dark mode, against the accessibility guidelines.

Documents become pages

2026-10-22T10:45:55+02:00

The paragraph styled Title is the page's title, the one styled Subtitle its introduction, like the line above. Without a Title, the document's name is the title. Everything else comes along as it is:

Text

Bold, italic and links. Links to web pages, e-mail and phone numbers work; anything else is left out. A heading is a heading on the page, with an anchor of its own to link to. To link to another page of your site, paste its full address: it becomes a link within the site.

Lists

Bulleted lists
Numbered lists
- and lists in lists
  - as deep as you need

First
Second
Third

Quotes

Docs has no quote style, so an indented paragraph becomes a quote:

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. — Edsger W. Dijkstra

Tables

In the folder	On the site
A folder	A section, or a subsection
A document	A page
A photo	A photo page
A number in front of a name	Its place in the order
A date in front of a name	Its date

Images

An image as wide as the page in the document is as wide as the text on the site:

An image you made smaller keeps that share of the width:

The first image in a document is also its picture on cards and in link previews.

What stays behind

Comments, suggestions, version history and Google's styling stay in the document. Foldocs rebuilds every page from a short list of allowed elements, so fonts and colours come from the site, never from the document: write freely, the site keeps it consistent.

A research group

2026-10-22T10:26:35+02:00

A research group already shares a drive: proposals, papers, notes from meetings. Its website is usually the one thing nobody can update, because it lives somewhere else, behind someone else's login. With Foldocs, the website is one more shared folder.

The folder

📁 Language Lab
- 📁 profile
  - 📄 home
  - 📄 About
  - 📄 Contact
  - 📄 Join us
  - 🖼️ The group.jpg
- 📁 1 Research
  - 📁 Speech in noise
    - 📄 01 The question
    - 📄 02 Methods
    - 🖼️ Setup.jpg
  - 📁 Children's reading
    - 📄 01 Overview
- 📁 2 People
  - 📄 01 Ada Lindqvist
  - 📄 02 Omar Haddad
  - 📄 03 Yuki Tanaka
- 📁 3 News
  - 📄 2026-09-30 New grant for the reading study
  - 📁 papers
  - 📁 talks

On the site

Three rows on the home page: Research, with a subsection per project; People, in the order of their numbers, each with their photo on their card; and News, newest first, filterable by papers and talks. Join us has no fixed role in profile, so it becomes a page of its own, linked in the footer. See The profile folder.

Working together

Drive decides who may write: give the group edit rights, and everyone keeps their own page up to date, with comments and suggestions as usual. The public only gets the link to view, which is all Foldocs needs. Nobody needs an account on the website, and nobody has to be its webmaster.

Good to know

A folder's description in Drive becomes its introduction: one line under each project
Papers as Docs get their own pages; a PDF in the folder is left out, so link to it instead
Search engines see who the site is by and when each post was published: see Search, feeds and the rest

A handbook

2026-10-22T10:26:35+02:00

A team's handbook is written in documents anyway: how we work, how to set things up, who to ask. Publishing it usually means copying it somewhere else, where it goes stale. With Foldocs the documents are the handbook, and the site is how you read it.

The folder

📁 Handbook
- 📁 profile
  - 📄 home
  - 📄 Contact
- 📁 1 Getting started
  - 📄 01 Your first day
  - 📄 02 Accounts and tools
  - 📄 03 Who's who
- 📁 2 How we work
  - 📄 01 Meetings
  - 📄 02 Writing things down
  - 📁 Releases
    - 📄 01 Checklist
- 📁 3 Reference
  - 📁 Glossary
  - 📁 Templates

On the site

Numbered chapters in numbered folders keep their order everywhere. Headings in a document become anchors to link to, so see Releases, step 3 can be a link. Shown as a folder tree, the whole handbook reads like a table of contents, every page one click away.

Reviewing

Changes are suggested and discussed in the documents, with comments, before anyone accepts them. Comments and suggestions never reach the site; the accepted text does, five minutes after the last edit. See From folder to site.

A personal site

2026-10-22T10:26:35+02:00

Say you're Sam, a designer who works freelance. You want a home page that says what you do, a portfolio in an order you choose, and somewhere to write now and then. Here is the whole site, as a folder:

The folder

📁 Sam's site
- 📁 profile
  - 📄 home
  - 📄 About
  - 📄 CV
  - 📄 Contact
  - 📄 Design
  - 🖼️ Sam.jpg
- 📁 1 Work
  - 📄 01 A museum's new identity
  - 📄 02 An annual report
  - 📄 03 Signs for a park
- 📁 2 Writing
  - 📄 2026-03-14 On choosing typefaces
  - 📄 Why I sketch on paper first
  - 📁 talks

On the site

The home page opens with the headline and intro from home, the list in it as Sam's topics, and the photo beside them. Below come two rows: Work, in the order of its numbers, and Writing, newest first, with talks as a subsection. The menu reads Work, Writing, About, CV and Contact; the CV page offers a PDF of itself.

Each project is a document with photos in it: the first one is its card's image. The post about typefaces is dated by its name, so it sits where it belongs in time, not where it was uploaded. See Dates and order.

Day to day

A new project: a new document in 1 Work, numbered where it should go
A new post: a document in 2 Writing; it goes live five minutes after the last edit
A new look: a colour or a font in Design, no theme needed

Good to know

Number every project, or none: a folder whose files are all numbered keeps their order, any other sorts by date. Keep drafts in another folder: everything in this one is public.

A travel journal

2026-10-22T10:26:35+02:00

On a trip, a laptop is extra weight and a website's editor is one login too many. A phone with the Drive app is enough: photos go into a folder, a sentence or two into a document, and the people at home follow along.

The folder

📁 Away
- 📁 profile
  - 📄 home
  - 📄 About us
- 📁 1 Iceland 2026
  - 📄 2026-06-02 Day 1: Reykjavík
  - 📄 2026-06-03 Day 2: The south coast
  - 🖼️ IMG_4012.jpg
  - 🖼️ Black sand.jpg
  - 🖼️ Skógafoss.jpg
- 📁 2 Japan 2027
  - 📄 Plans

On the site

A row per trip, newest first. Every photo gets its own page, dated by when it was taken, not when it was uploaded, so a batch sent home on the last day still lands on the right days. A photo's description in Drive is its caption; IMG_4012 gets no title, since a camera's name for it means nothing to a reader. See Photos and images.

The same journal reads well as a blog: one column, newest first, every trip mixed in by date.

Good to know

Photos are made in five sizes, so the site stays fast on a phone at home too
The camera's location stays out of the site's images; the originals stay in Drive
Wi-Fi only now and then? Upload when you can: the site follows within minutes

Host it yourself

2026-10-22T10:26:32+02:00

Share a folder in Google Drive with anyone with the link.
In the Google Cloud console, create a project, enable the Google Drive API and create an API key for it. No billing needed.
Get the code from GitHub, and copy .env.example to .env: fill in the folder's ID, the key, your site's address and your name.
Run docker compose up -d. One container keeps the site in step with the folder, the other serves it, behind the web server you already have.

The README has the details: Nextcloud, themes, variants, and running it without Docker.

A hosted version

2026-10-22T10:26:32+02:00

We're working on a hosted Foldocs: share your folder with a link, choose an address, done. Watch the repository on GitHub to hear when it's ready.

Nextcloud

2026-10-21T12:00:00+02:00

Not everyone keeps their documents with Google. Nextcloud runs on servers its users choose: at home, at their organisation, at a provider they trust. Foldocs now reads a Nextcloud folder just as it reads a Drive folder, through nothing but its share link.

Setting it up

In Nextcloud, share the folder with a share link, read only. A password is fine.
Give Foldocs the link (and the password) instead of a Drive folder and key.
That's it: no account, no app to register, no key.

What's different

Nextcloud keeps documents as files, so pages there are Word files (.docx); set your office app to save as Word rather than OpenDocument. A share has no descriptions, so folders get no introductions and photos no captions, and it can't turn a CV into a PDF. Everything else works the same: sections, subsections, dates, numbers, photos, themes and the Design document.

More in Share a folder. OneDrive and Dropbox are next.