The problem I was solving
Sharing documents is more awkward than it should be. I had certificates, a resume, and a few other things I wanted to share publicly, and every time someone asked I was sending different links from different places. Some from Drive, some as attachments. It felt messy.
I wanted one URL that always showed everything in one place, organized, with no login required, no ads, no clutter. Something that looked intentional rather than thrown together.
What it is
Anson's Drive is a single-page web app that works like a minimal file manager. There are folders, each folder shows files with previews and captions, and you can search or sort everything in real time. Clicking the copy button for any file copies its link to the clipboard. That's the whole product.
No backend. No database. The whole thing is static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript reading from JSON metadata files.
The design decisions
The most important decision was where data should live. I chose flat JSON files per folder rather than anything server-side, which meant the whole thing could be hosted for free on Netlify with no ongoing cost and no infrastructure to maintain. The tradeoff is that adding a file requires editing JSON manually, but I built an admin form that generates the JSON for you so it's not actually tedious.
The folder structure mirrors how you'd think about it naturally. Each folder has a metadata.json that describes what's inside. The JavaScript fetches that file when you click the folder and builds the grid from it. Search and sort both work on the same in-memory array so there's no additional fetching when you filter.
{
"filename": "aws-certificate.pdf",
"caption": "AWS Cloud Practitioner",
"tags": ["certificate", "cloud", "aws"],
"updated": "12-01-2025",
"preview_image": "aws-preview.jpg"
}
Building it
I planned the structure and user experience first: what folders, what information shows per file, how copy-link should behave, what the search scope should be. Once the design was clear, I used AI tools to speed up the coding -- something I do regularly to move faster on implementation once the decisions are made.
The clipboard interaction has a small detail I like: when you copy a link, the icon swaps from copy to a checkmark for two seconds. It's a tiny thing but it gives you clear confirmation without any popup or toast message getting in the way.
What the featured page is for
There's a separate /featured.html page that pulls from a global featured.json spanning all folders. The idea was to have a curated view of the most relevant documents rather than making someone dig through folders. For sharing a resume or a specific certificate quickly, it's cleaner.
What I took away from this
A well-defined data contract (the JSON schema) is what makes a simple system maintainable over time. Once that was locked in, everything else -- the rendering, search, sort, admin form -- all just worked around it. The app is genuinely useful for me day to day, which is the real measure of whether something was worth building.
Getting comfortable with Netlify and the deployment workflow was also a useful byproduct. Static hosting is surprisingly powerful for the right use cases.