New p2p blog using jekyll

So what is this about?

After a long time I set up a blog again. Currently, I have no idea if I have anything interesting to say.

Then why settings up a blog?

Because I wanted to test how it is to use Beaker and Jekyll to maintain a blog (or a page).

What is this Beaker?

Beaker is a modified Chromium browser which can browse on websites which are hosted inside a p2p network called Dat. It allows to easily host own websites which are available in the Beaker browser. To publish changes, one has to commit the current state which creates a new version. This is similar to a Git project.

With this, I can work on this blog locally and when I’m ready, I can click publish and my computer serves the changes.

Ok, then what is Dat?

Dat uses encryption to share the content to others and the public key of the documents is what one could call the ip address or the hostname of the data. To keep the public key private to other participantss of the network, a hashed version of the public key is used as identifier instead of the public key directly. This leads to a end-to-end encryption of the data.

When changes are published, a new version will be created - it’s versionized. Older versions can always be checked out so nothing can get lost anymore and no censorship is possible.

When you browse on a page you can get a local copy of the page and let it automatically sync when it changes. This allows to make offline changes. Since you and no one else doesn’t have the private key, the page cannot be modified.

This automatically leads to mirroring of the page. If more people access a page, they get a copy which they will share again. This means the authors server will not have such a high traffic impact. Cients can load a page from different servers at the same time like in bittorrent. Also, mirroring means that it is harder that content gets lost.

Sounds awesome! But do I have to install Beaker to access the page?

No, there are tools which allow to share Dat content over http and https. I use hashbase.io to share my content. You just need to give them the dat-address to the content and it mirrors and shares it over https and Dat. Shareing it as Dat makes the URL more readable.

The other benefit is that my page automatically gets mirrored on hashbase.

And what is jekyll?

It’s a software which allows to maintain a new page using markdown files. I save posts in a special format in a special folder and jekyll translates it to HTML and automatically applies a template. No server side logic like CGI or PHP is required. I can do it all on my local computer.

Wow, this is awesome!

I know!

Anything else?

Yes, Beaker has a programming interface where the user can create apps. I reviewed the documentation a little bit but didn’t play with it yet.