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There’s a simple alternative to the current web

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Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#81

Post by purplerails »

asaddhamani wrote: post #57
purplerails wrote: post #12

I've been thinking about this for a while now. Please check out my web app to solve this problem: https://www.purplerails.com/ The main idea is to use a browser extension to automatically save pages that you read to the cloud (including the images, stylesheets etc) in the background. Saved pages are searchable and sharable.

I tried giving purplerails a shot. I use LastPass for password management, and I am not going to type in a 25/30 character password every single time I want to log into an application. I think you're going way too hard on that part. This is the first time I've had this happen to me when using a web app, and it immediately made me close the page.

Thanks for taking the time to write your feedback. I appreciate it.

With PurpleRails, you will rarely be typing your password once you successfully login. It works kinda like Gmail/Facebook etc: you remain logged in for months at a time.

This page explains why password saving doesn't work yet: https://www.purplerails.com/blog/saving-passwords-why-we-hav...

I'll see if I can do something fancier than what I do now to allow saved passwords to work. I suspect that using a Javascript-based AJAX authentication system instead of a plain-old HTML form, I can achieve the privacy goals as well as ease of use.

I hope you will hang in there and use the current version until I figure out a way to fix this. Thanks!

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#82

Post by yuvadam »

sroerick wrote: post #70
idlewords wrote: post #6

Clearly I'm a biased observer, but I really think people should take steps to archive stuff that is important to them. Of course it's terrible when large sites go offline and take vast swaths of the Internet with them, and we should continue to shame the ones that do it. At the same time, if something is really important to you, you shouldn't store it in the form of links to random third-party servers. One problem we…

Slightly related to this, the other day I tried to download every youtube video in my watch history. Turns out it's pretty much impossible. The Youtube API only delivers about 20 results, which is a bug that has existed for about 2 years. I tried manually loading the watch history page, and was only able to get about 1000 out of ~8000 results. When I selected those 1000 results and tried to add them to a playlist, th…

You can use youtube-dl to do this:

    $ youtube-dl ':ythistory' -u USER -p PWD --write-pages
Of course, you won't get your entire history since g00gle would rather mine all your personal data itself, and never share it back with you again.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#83

Post by hnha »

sroerick wrote: post #70
idlewords wrote: post #6

Clearly I'm a biased observer, but I really think people should take steps to archive stuff that is important to them. Of course it's terrible when large sites go offline and take vast swaths of the Internet with them, and we should continue to shame the ones that do it. At the same time, if something is really important to you, you shouldn't store it in the form of links to random third-party servers. One problem we…

Slightly related to this, the other day I tried to download every youtube video in my watch history. Turns out it's pretty much impossible. The Youtube API only delivers about 20 results, which is a bug that has existed for about 2 years. I tried manually loading the watch history page, and was only able to get about 1000 out of ~8000 results. When I selected those 1000 results and tried to add them to a playlist, th…

It baffles me how we got from "tracking is creepy" to "please track all I do on your site" in ~10 years.

Your watch history should be stored by your browser on your machine. It is only your business and only locally it is fully in your control.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#84

Post by michaelchisari »

grkvlt wrote: post #79
michaelchisari wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would not be simple or easy, but crypto-currency blockchains make it more possible than ever.

What does this mean? I can't understand the relationship between the two ideas?

In the most rudimentary form, this is how:

http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...

More reasonable ways of utilizing a blockchain for undeletable data are emerging, though.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#85

Post by sroerick »

hnha wrote: post #83
sroerick wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly related to this, the other day I tried to download every youtube video in my watch history. Turns out it's pretty much impossible. The Youtube API only delivers about 20 results, which is a bug that has existed for about 2 years. I tried manually loading the watch history page, and was only able to get about 1000 out of ~8000 results. When I selected those 1000 results and tried to add them to a playlist, th…

It baffles me how we got from "tracking is creepy" to "please track all I do on your site" in ~10 years. Your watch history should be stored by your browser on your machine. It is only your business and only locally it is fully in your control.

I agree with you.

My watch history is currently in the hands of Google.

I'm trying to copy it so that I have it saved locally.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#86

Post by sroerick »

lutusp wrote: post #78
sroerick wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My second reply, but, I think that this is really important. We only need to look at early film history to know how easy it is to lose massive parts of our history. Going back to old pages, I frequently get 404 results. For politically sensitive documents, the problem is much more widespread. I would like something that not only archives pages I visit, but also versions them and tracks changes. If there was a bookmar…

It clearly hasn't occurred to you that private collections evaporate over time, just like public ones. > I would like something that not only archives pages I visit, but also versions them and tracks changes. That's a huge storage requirement, you must realize this. If you're an avid Web browser, and if every archived page had to look as it originally looked (i.e. all the linked resources) you could accumulate severa…

I never said I was trying to save my entire web cache locally. Just bookmarks.

I don't have Flash Player installed. Instead, I use youtube-dl for flash videos across many websites. I'm well aware of the storage implications of this kind of activity.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#87

Post by samdroid »

pjbrunet wrote: post #72

I'd rather a page go offline than have it taken out of context. As if plagiarism wasn't bad enough already. (Yahoo Answers cough ) These crooks will even steal your copyright notice. It's quite possible the original content producers are offline because scraper thieves stole so much content that it's no longer possible to earn a living. As an artist, this reminds me of the condescending attitude that gave us fake Rol…

The author is not suggesting taking others content and calling it their own - he is suggesting almost keeping a backup with a bibliography. Infact, this already exists today - do you hate archive.org?

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#88

Post by sroerick »

yuvadam wrote: post #82
sroerick wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly related to this, the other day I tried to download every youtube video in my watch history. Turns out it's pretty much impossible. The Youtube API only delivers about 20 results, which is a bug that has existed for about 2 years. I tried manually loading the watch history page, and was only able to get about 1000 out of ~8000 results. When I selected those 1000 results and tried to add them to a playlist, th…

You can use youtube-dl to do this: $ youtube-dl ':ythistory' -u USER -p PWD --write-pages Of course, you won't get your entire history since g00gle would rather mine all your personal data itself, and never share it back with you again.

I tried this earlier. The result:

[youtube:history] playlist Youtube Watch History: Collected 0 video ids (downloading 0 of them)

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#89

Post by tonyg »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #76
can09 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he seems to be getting at is a much larger, more revolutionary approach to not just "the web", but "the internet" as we know it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking

Thats a very academic and static view of content - I don't see how that would work in todays hyper-dynamic environment, where the Ads that are displayed on a site are priced by millisecond real-time auctions before they are delivered to the user, and websites are single-page apps with REST APIs in the background. How would that work?

By transclusion. You'd cache the big, reusable chunks of content, and serve up a fresh transient little document that transcluded both the larger content chunks and the dynamically-included advertisements.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#90

Post by sroerick »

DanBC wrote: post #61
idlewords wrote: post #6

Clearly I'm a biased observer, but I really think people should take steps to archive stuff that is important to them. Of course it's terrible when large sites go offline and take vast swaths of the Internet with them, and we should continue to shame the ones that do it. At the same time, if something is really important to you, you shouldn't store it in the form of links to random third-party servers. One problem we…

Many people just don't have the clue to make usable local archives. You're also proposing mass copyright infringement which - stupidly in this example - is not legal.

I'm interested in artists who release things under Creative Commons, or works that exist or are released into the public domain.

These tools would work fine for me, without risk of copyright infringement. Just because you don't use libre content doesn't mean that the rest of us should have a broken internet.

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