search

AraBlocks / ara-file-manager

Electron-based desktop app to publish and purchase content with ARA
https://ara.one/app
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
26 stars 4 forks source link

Design local site template for creators #558

Open zootella opened 5 years ago

zootella commented 5 years ago

So far, most peer-to-peer, PC-to-PC content distribution gives the user a pile of files. The user experience for BitTorrent and RAR is Windows Explorer and then whatever desktop app responds to a double-click: maybe VLC for audio or video, or the picture preview app that came with your operating system.

Consumer computing platforms that came after the PC: websites and apps, offer a much prettier and easier to use experience, but one that's still limited: a creator's music in Spotify looks and works exactly the way Spotify wants it to, same with a photographer's photos on Flickr or Instagram. In this current gen, the platforms control the presentation. Instead, the creator should.

So, this issue is to design a framework to make it easy for creators to make local websites to present their content to users in a visually rich, UI-unencumbered, and completely decentralized way.

The target user is the creator, who has a PC and can use SquareSpace, for instance, but isn't familiar with the command line.

Ara brainstorm, 2019 June, Kevin

zootella commented 5 years ago

There are a bunch of static site generators--a very popular one is Jekyll:

https://jekyllrb.com/

and, i'm playing around with them. So far, though, I can't find any that support file://--they all assume that there's a real webserver somewhere that can talk HTTP. This means that a site wouldn't work if the file manager isn't running (or is on a different computer). They also all use Webpack, making remixing sites harder. So, still looking...