What happens to existing websites?

Beginners
1

I am a web designer (not developer). I have put a lot of time and money into my membership sites (UFO experiencer sites)… What happens to existing sites when this becomes the new internet?

Will I have to become a developer to create sites? Will my old sites be obsolete?

Response (Editable by anyone)

For static content/html all you need to do is copy all the files to a public share on SAFE and they can be accessed directly by a standard web browser. A SAFE aware web browser will be able to resolve a SAFE URL (something like “safe:DanaD/public/mysite/”), while a browser that doesn’t know how to do this would need to access the files using the locally mounted SAFE drive, which worksas if the files were stored on a local drive.

However, very little of today’s web is static, which is a problem!

Most websites use a backend database (CMS) and generate the HTML dynamically from this for every page request submitted by the browser.

So in most cases there will be a need to either:

A) Convert them to static HTML and lose the functionality of CMS and many end user features
B) enable these legacy systems to run on the client, using SAFE just for the data.
C) port them to a new SAFE based CMS style architecture

Only C) is at all satisfactory IMO, because:

A) will simply not work for most websites, and where it does will have reduced end user features and be expensive to maintain. I think an app to do this conversation will be useful and very popular (Convert Your Website To SAFE!), but will also show these limitations very quickly.
B) is a cludge, but technically straightforward and will preserve most of the user experience and CMS features of the website, keeping the websites both functional and easy to maintain. It will however require every user to have a full database backend and web server installed, which therefore requires an installer to be developed and adopted by the website builders, and for users to have set it up before they can use these websites.
C) Is the long term solution and needs to be developed pretty much from scratch, probably in stages: stage one being a browser extension to access static HTML websites hosted on SAFE. This gradually being enhanced to replace the backend and server features of B), first within the plugin, and later within a native SAFE browser.

The first plugin is under development - route C). I’m not aware of people working in A) or B).

The opportunity is huge though, for obvious reasons, so I expect that a successful SAFE launch will be followed by a lot of interest and activity in this area. So don’t despair!

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2

Nothing.
Old sites will work fine. If you want to access the site through MaidSafe, you just copy or migrate the content to MaidSafe, although for dynamic content you may initially need to continue using some Web-based services (e.g. for your forums, perhaps). Think of v1.0 as a nearly free and distributed Amazon S3 + PayPal.

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@janitor is right for static content/html, but very little of today’s web is static, which is a problem. Most websites use a backend database (CMS) and generate the HTML dynamically from this for every page request submitted by the browser.

So in most cases there will be a need to either:

A) Convert them to static HTML and lose the functionality of CMS and many end user features
B) enable these legacy systems to run on the client, using SAFE just for the data.
C) port them to a new SAFE based CMS style architecture

Only C) is at all satisfactory IMO, because:

A) will simply not work for most websites, and where it does will have reduced end user features and be expensive to maintain. I think an app to do this conversation will be useful and very popular (Convert Your Website To SAFE!), but will also show these limitations very quickly.
B) is a cludge, but technically straightforward and will preserve most of the user experience and CMS features of the website, keeping the websites both functional and easy to maintain. It will however require every user to have a full database backend and web server installed, which therefore requires an installer to be developed and adopted by the website builders, and for users to have set it up before they can use these websites.
C) Is the long term solution and needs to be developed pretty much from scratch, probably in stages: stage one being a browser extension to access static HTML websites hosted on SAFE. This gradually being enhanced to replace the backend and server features of B), first within the plugin, and later within a native SAFE browser.

The first plugin is under development - route C). I’m not aware of people working in A) or B).

The opportunity is huge though, for obvious reasons, so I expect that a successful SAFE launch will be followed by a lot of interest and activity in this area. So don’t despair!

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Thanks to those who gave a truly helpful answer. I only stated what type of sites because I didn’t want others to assume they were “that” type of sites. The main site I designed is a hub for astronauts, physicists, scientists and multiple PHDs.

Just now in the last couple of years the wordpress format is allowing people like myself to create truly interactive and dynamic websites by using plugins. Currently I have many features for my users, IM, Profiles, music,video,picture uploads, blogs, social walls, forum etc. With no knowledge of how to build a website and nothing but a domain, hosting program and the base of wordpress people like myself can dig in and learn and create.

So the maidsafe will be similar to wordpress perhaps? We will have base programs with additional add ons? I would hate to see the platform type (wordpress) go away.

I truly believe that giving the average person the ability to create interactive sites is very important. If I had been forced to pay a developer to create my sites they would not exist. Instead I used my free time to learn how to use wordpress but the platform and plugins allowed me a much needed crutch.

If the aps were made to work together then people could still build upon the base. I hope this is the case. I guess this a plea to the programmers to look at the development process and see if it can be set up so that the programs build upon each other and work together like the wordpress format. Otherwise only programmers or the wealthy businesses, corporations or individuals will have interactive sites.

Dana
:slight_smile:

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I moved 9 posts to a new topic: Space aliens

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Am I correct in understanding that NoSQL databases that support sharding should work on MaidSAFE? Or is that a “Down the road” question?

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I don’t understand the question (my ignorance) well enough to know the answer, but can parrot a bit: SAFE provides a key value store, so is effectively a NoSQL database, somewhat like Hadoop. Don’t ask me to explain what I just said. :wink:

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I fully understand and support your plea and hope it will be heard. This won’t be the case at launch though, so it will take a while. Assuming SAFE takes if though I think this will be a popular request so should be picked up in dine form.

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Since SAFEnet is basically a file system, it should be possible I guess to run for example MySQL and PHP on it. Performance-wise, well maybe not very fast, ha ha. However, remember that information technology is progressing exponentially. Also for reads, the caching on SAFEnet will speed up the access.

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Good good good!! I hope it is. It would be wonderful if those of us with websites could still use them in the “afterdays” LOL

I sooo hope you are right!

Dana

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@Anders :

Since SAFEnet is basically a file system, it should be possible I guess to run for example MySQL and PHP on it.

This is option B) described in my my reply

46

Don’t forgot about option D:

David Irvine invents homomorphic encryption, allowing users to purchase compute time on networked machines without revealing user data.

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Homomorphic sounds like a morphing man LOL. But seriously can you explain more what it means? Is that like server space.

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I should’ve chosen my words more carefully because the idea has been around a while, and looks already to be possible but not yet practical. So I was more or less proposing to David to make this a reality sooner rather than later.

The ideal implementation involving homomorphic encryption would be to send data to an untrusted third party in an encrypted format, have them compute some result based on that data (without actually decrypting it, or knowing the contents), and then return the result to you in a way that you can verify as correct.

Wired article, wikipedia page.