Decentralise Your Blog: A Guide to Censorship-Resistant Blogging

welcome to this Workshop our topic is permissionless publishing and we will see four things today installing swarm desktop and purchasing a postage stamp using ether jot a demo application to publish on Swarm importing existing blogs onto the Swarm Network working with web components such as a commment system and a donation widget hosting websites and applications on this form Network comes with multiple benefits these include being full control of your data having simply infrastructure due to no servers required protection of your privacy and anonymity and your content cannot be sensored or taken down in today's Workshop we walk through the steps of setting UPS form on your computer and using a sample application to publish to install form head over to the desktop. sw.org website and download this desktop application after that simply run it and it will download the B binary for you next step is funding your bodde which requires xti while this Workshop does not show you how to get your hands on XD we have several tutorials on our blog and in our docs to explain it I already have XD so I'm going to move over to the funding step in this swap step swarm desktop automatically exchanges some of your xd2 XP EZ it uses a decentralized exchange for this step once that's done we wait for a short while to synchronize with main net and then we are good to go last step is creating a postage stamp which is a swarm concept but it can be easily understood as upload all in this form Network uploads are paid which gives you a guarantee that there will be no operators who sustained the network through the motivation of micro payments we are creating a stamp worth 4 GB of data for one week having done these steps you are all set up and can use swarm desktop to upload any data which will be hosted on the Swarm Network now moving on to Ether jot a demo application that can be accessed from swarm desktop system tray as we open ether jot a welcome screen greets us ether jot needs a local B node which we have thanks to swarm desktop it also needs a postage stem to cover our uploads we have purchased it just a moment ago so we are good this checkbox is a reminder that ether JW does not manage our postage stamp it is up up to us to keep it alive otherwise our blog may go down let's give our blog a name and get started we have arrived to the main page of ether jot we will spend most of the time here there are four areas of Interest the top bar the sidebar the option bar and and the editor in the top bar we see the address of our blog which is a SW feed in the sidebar we have our posts none right now in the option bar we can set properties of our new article and lastly the editor is where we can write our markdown on the left and see the preview on the right before we do anything let's click open in the top bar this is our blog already on SW it is an empty state of course so we should add some content to it I am going to speed up the footage of me blogging I'm using several markdown formatting here but it appears all nicely on the right every article needs a title which should be unique and a category the date is also required field but it is preset for us as I click publish the page refreshes and my new article appears in the sidebar clicking on its title navigates me to the live blog and here is what the build page looks like by clicking the logo in the header we can get back to the front page my post is also here with the default Banner image to spice things up let's bring in our own assets you may have noticed the asset browser button in the sidebar clicking it brings up a new model this serves as our Gallery I'm clicking add new and upload an image from my disk by clicking edit under my hello word article we now see an indicator that we are not writing a new blog post but editing an existing one using the image I just uploaded let's set the new Banner image and now that we check on the blog again we see that indeed that Banner image has been updated important to note that this image is also on this war Network and cannot be taken down just like our blog let's move on and check what the settings page looks like here here we have lots of customization options split into different sections such as header footer social and even extensions as a next step I want to change the default logo to one of my own and for that I'm just going to repeat the steps with the asset browser it is important not to forget applying the changes by pressing save and then we are good to check on our blog if it has updated by the way to get back to the main page just press the plus button in the sidebar for the next feature we need way more articles I'm going to play you spad up footage again and then show something new stay [Music] tuned [Music] I have written two new articles and that for which I called fillers you will see why in a moment so I promised a new feature let's click edit in our shiny hello word article and check this property called type type can be regular primary or secondary let's go with primary and see what it does it made our hello word article stand out its design looks a bit different and this is the flagship post of our blog now the rest of the Articles remain unchanged with the two other proper articles try the secondary type I'm going to give the page a refresh and check what happened so normally the post take 1/4 of a row secondary takes up a double and the primary takes up the full screen you can use these properties to make some articles Stand Out marking them as more important and play with the layout a little bit let's customize our blog a little more by changing the description in the header setting a message in the footer and providing a social link for even more customization options with regards to the design and layout you can always Fork the code and modify it at your will this project is full fully open source and free to use for everyone ether jot also gives you an option to import your existing blogs the currently supported blog engines are Hugo and jaill if you already have a Blog and wanted to create a backup on Swarm or even switch over to swarm and continue writing here I will show you how you can do it importing your blog comes with one caveat it is only available in the CLI due to browser restrictions since Yugo uses goang and Jau uses Ruby you are probably familiar with working from the CLI anyway for this you need to have no JS installed first install ether jot with npm install hyphen hyphen Global ether jot step into the root of your blog and run eer jot import we see lots of logs being written as the import happens once it's done you receive two outputs one is the address of your blog on form which I can click and verify that my blog has been properly imported the second is a Json which contains the Full state of my blog I'm going to copy this string opener. web click settings and then import I put the Json here click import and now I can continue writing my blog on Swarm from ether jot webui right where I left off in Hugo or Jacko we still have two web components to try out both are available in ether jot and can be enabled from the settings page but it is very important to know that these components can be used without ether jot or any arbitrary pages and they will work out of the box I am going to enable both set my ethereum address then save and create a dummy page as we visit the page we notice some new features one is a donation component and the other is a discussion system the donation system enables fans to either send small tips or which is more swarm Centric top up the author stamp and donate by increasing the length of the paid hosting now onto the comments or discussion system I probably don't have to explain what comments are but it may be interesting to learn how they work they have no back end and fully decentralized and this is all done by using nothing more than swarm feeds swarm feeds are really great enabling Dynamic content which is Unstoppable and requires no servers there is a builtin feature to reply to comments with unlimited depth you could even consider it a super basic version of Reddit isn't even up to implementing the real thing since comments may be subject to spam the author can cherry pick meaningful comments which are shown by default what's great is that the comments cannot be tempered with only moved over to a trusted Tab and readers can always switch back to the old tab to see every single comment in their original form for the last part I'm going to open my sample website it's not much just some placeholder texts and images this is what it looks like currently by adding just a few lines of code I have integrated the discussion system and the donation component to my page you can replicate this anytime with the same code and you will have these features enabled powered by the Swarm Network I hope you like this workshop and I managed to show the possibilities of the Swarm Network and the demo applications and components I invite everyone to use these tools and to further develop them on this warm Network the building blocks are already there such as feeds which we used a lot under the H today all these projects are open source feel free to check them out and learn more about this form Network thank you for your attention and interest