It started with a telephone call from my father. He was in desperate need of getting a large file to a client, and was blocked by gmail. The normal course of action he had taken was to upload the file to his website and email the link. Unfortunately, now, Google For Domains hosts all of his content and there is no way to upload a file to his website. There lies the dilemma.
The temporary fix was to host the file for him, but during this process a new idea emerged. “I bet this is a common problem” I thought. So the following weekend I went to work creating SendTool.
SendTool had to be painless, no tedious logins or heavy graphics were in its future. I decided early on to stick to the basics, its really just temporary file storage. What do we really care about here? Well, we need to upload a file. Thats a good start, what else? How about a description of that file, password protection, and a setting for just how temporary the storage will be. Enough brainstorming, time to build it.
Coding the site didn’t take long, but I could definitely have used a graphic designer. I’m an engineer, I think by definition that means I’m horrible with graphics. The site is simple, comprised of only 3 pages. The upload form, the upload complete page, and the download page. The upload form takes all your information and uploads it. The upload complete page gives you a summary of what you uploaded and provides download links for you to distribute. And the download page serves your file to its recipient. With these three pages, I had covered the basics. It was functional.
And so, a new application was born. I sprinkled some Google ads around just so people could be assured the site is absolutely free. Click them if you’d like
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