I've started using Google docs a bit. One thing I thought would be neat would be to upload the all the .doc, .odt and .sxw files I have spread across multiple systems and hard drives (some of which aren't even connected to a computer). Being able to search it all online would be nice.
Some problems:
- Google Docs has a 1000 doc limit
- Also, each doc (not counting images) is limited to 500k. This was a problem a couple of times.
- Docs are all converted into HTML, so some formatting might get messed up.
- It oddly doesn't do a great job searching. I have a file named "laptopacademic_distributed_finalStuff.odt" (and a bunch of other files prefixed with laptopacademic), if I search for laptopacademic nothing is returned. Searching by file name is all I have now, and with Google apparently I loose that. Irony!
Really what I want is a Flickr for documents. I just upload all my photos and feel secure in the knowledge that they are being backed up and are (at the very least) in chronological order and accessible from any computer. I still keep local copies, but I don't fret about it as much as I did before Flickr. It costs like ~$25/year, which actually does make me feel a bit more secure about it (no free lunch!)
You can pay Google $50/year and I'd imagine many of the above arbitrary limits would be lifted (though you couldn't use your current account, thats another issue entirely). I'm guessing it still wouldn't save a copy of the original file though. Google docs does have a revision system, so there's already a logical place to put access to the original copy.
Anyways I did make
a quick Ruby script. I found the state of e-mail libraries to be pretty poor. Either unmaintained or poor documentation or both. However, I found the 'gmailer' library to be in good shape. So I used that in my script.
