tl;dr Browser based see + cloud storage + simple web hosting for that cloud storage = 21st websites for everyone!

Pontifications

  • This site, rolandtanglao,com, uses a command line static website generator called jekyll written in ruby which generates HTML which I then upload to the free static website hosting service surge.sh
  • This is great for me. Since command lines, ruby et al are my friends since 1984 :-) ! (i first used the Unix command line in 1984 or maybe a year or 2 earlier not sure!)
  • But it’s dumb, why couldn’t I do this in a web browser?
  • Make it so lazy web :-)
  • Anyhow this isn’t an original idea.
  • Dave Winer’s been riffing on this for ages and here’s a quote from his most recent thinking on browser static site generation plus uploading to static site cloud hosting:

QUOTE

Here's a sketch of how the service would work.
1. Start with a user-facing service like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive.
2. Add an API that allows a JavaScript app running in the browser to write into a folder in a user's space. The user grants access via oAuth, as they do with Twitter, Facebook, etc.
3. Connect to a registrar to allow a user to associate a domain name with a folder. Or map a domain they register elsewhere. A revenue opportunity.

END QUOTE

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