I was thinking about a way to make a simple social/group type network on SAFE and wanted to throw this idea out there.
My understanding on websites with safe is that a user will simply upload their HTML/JS/CSS into a folder and it will be displayed at their designated web address (however that format ends up getting resolved.)
My question is, would it be possible to have a premade template/folder structure that could be shared in a users public folder(s)? It could be linked to their username and would display essentially their “profile” site of images/albums/videos/posts and allow other users to friend them, upload content on their site and add comments, etc…
This would allow for the user to maintain all their own data and even select custom CSS templates or whatever to change the look of their site. I was thinking it could be updated/refreshed every time a change was made which would allow it to still be pretty much a static site. It would seem this would also be accessible from multiple devices with a responsive template…
I suppose it would be akin to something like downloading the data from your Facebook profile and hosting it locally on your SAFE public folder…
Did I miss anything that would make this not feasible or just an outright wrong way to approach this?..
If I’ve understood you, this equates to a simple “homepage” building app. User fills out some details (their profile), selects the template/skin they like, chooses a public name for the site and clicks publish (similar to the August 31 Dev Update demo).
Creating a public directory might not be that hard too, so users can find other users. Each user could maintain a list of other users they know, saved in their own storage (as an SD), and these lists could be shared to create a public network/directory of connections so users can find other users.
I don’t see a privacy issue here because if you create a public profile, you would want people to find it.
I think that would be a great little app to help bootstrap activity and provide interest / something to do after you’ve installed. Much better than the SAFE Webring!
Oh hey, so that’s how you found my thread; you’ve been thinking about related things!
I believe it’s a great idea, and something like this would in fact be necessary to what I am talking about in that thread: a standardized way of storing profile data and also presentation (e.g. banner image, color scheme, …) that can be used by apps to display whatever they want.
For profile data, why not use something existing, such as (maybe subsets of) vCard or jCard or FOAF?
Applications could provide their own methods for rendering, e.g. in the form of an HTML template (but the details are really the app’s own business; they for example could opt to not use any of the style information provided by a social profile.)
To be honest, the idea of having custom templates for profiles kind of clashes with a proposal I had; it’s about themes for accounts.
My idea of theming would affect the way apps appear for the user whom the profile belongs to. This would act as a safeguard against apps impersonifying SAFE apps: the themes are only visible to the user themselves, so only after a successful login could an app display them. If something doesn’t show up with the proper theme, it’s not a legit app.
Also, different identities of the same person (i.e. sub-accounts) could have different themes, which would help users avoid embarrassing mistakes.
