Hello All,
We launched XOR a couple of days ago. It’s a platform for hosting static websites and SPAs on Blockstack.
Thank you all for your feedback and support so far.
We’ve updated the landing page a little bit to explain the use case better. We would love to hear your feedback on the items listed in the “Why” section. Just wanted to make sure that we are not making any tall claims when it comes to Blockstack tech.
Plans:
We are planning to develop a standalone XOR application (desktop initially), for hosting and browsing websites on Blockstack and access them using the Blockstack name (no DNS dependency). The idea is to support the deployment of other Blockstack apps. But for that, I think, XOR desktop needs to be an authenticator app (like Blockstack browser).
A question we have for the Blockstack core team: how feasible is it, at this point, to deploy a Gaia hub using only Blockstack Naming Service (BNS)?
We would love to hear your feedback, suggestions, and questions.
PS: We are currently in the process of creating a searchable list of websites hosted using XOR, but don’t have a lot of data. So it would be fantastic if you all could help us out and deploy something using your Blockstack name.
Very cool. Do you think that we could create an altered version of Atlas that stores entries in a (giant) database so you could just lookup all the ones with the A/AAAA entries?
In addition, I’m guessing CNAME is ignored because subdomains are treated as their own unique names, right?
I’m very excited for this project though. A true Blockstack browser is something I’ve dreamed of making but I know it’s too much work to do alone – best of luck to you guys!
Feedback: it’s incredibly easy to use! Suggestions: allow the chrome/firefox/brave/safari browser refresh button to refresh a XOR hosted page. Currently, hitting refresh brings you back to the XOR homepage. And even though the ID remains in the search field at the top, you have to retype it again to return back to the XOR hosted page. Also, it would be great if XOR could store folders. Currently, if you upload a folder it extracts all files to a single directory. Questions: There’s a field for the website “version” which you update manually. Is it possible to revert to an older version? Is that saved and accessible on Gaia somewhere?
Can you search a site like this — I did some tests with Google’s site syntax and it didn’t return results. Is the intention to make site that are non-indexable / searchable?
First of all, thank you for the shoutout on Twitter and the feedback & suggestions here!
Just fixed and deployed. Now refreshing the browser tab should take you directly to the last Blockstack name you used.
Previously it was required that the entry point file not to be inside a folder, so dropping a single folder was not working. Updated and deployed to support this.
We plan to support multiple versions of the same website and allow to switch between versions easily; we are actively coding this feature, should be available by the end of this month.
The version information is available in Gaia, here are the details you saved for your website: https://gaia.blockstack.org/hub/1PzpW9DzjKpFBXxpEQ7LtiUsez7EJgTPCR/hosting.json
@moxiegirl Someone asked a similar question on Product Hunt. To be honest with you, we didn’t really think about making the websites indexable for Google. We intend to eventually make this into a standalone browsing & hosting platform and move completely away from DNS and related services. I agree that the websites hosted should be discoverable some way. I am working on an indexer which would index publicly available hosting information, like this one https://gaia.blockstack.org/hub/1PzpW9DzjKpFBXxpEQ7LtiUsez7EJgTPCR/hosting.json, and create a searchable list of websites hosted on Blockstack. The list will be available in XOR landing page soon.
My pleasure! Thanks for the immediate response and for deploying the updates. Can confirm - the refresh update is working perfectly. The folder deployment is working, as well. My only feedback here (which isn’t too critical) is that it would be an awesome UX to provide users with an option to view a nested directory interface (instead of only listing out all the files with their directories in the file name - although I understand the usefulness in that, too). Great to hear about the future version control feature. Thanks for the Gaia link and domain url. I love that XOR sites can be accessed by anyone - even if they don’t have blockstack installed.
Will be sure to share more thoughts as they pop up Thanks again @muneebm.
Thanks again