₽lato turns the stuff on your hard drive into a website.
Think of it as an IndieWeb-inspired web-based photo/video/everything asset browser.
The website will be generated on your hard drive, and from there you can FTP, upload to S3, or do whatever you feel like.
Because of Forms. Or "shapes", really.
All your assets come in a certain shape. Or, you'd like to view or present it in a certain shape.
A review comes in the shape "precis of content, followed by your opinion of said content, perhaps enhanced with some media (like a book cover), followed by a point rating (e.g. out of 5 stars, or 10 marks)".
A photograph comes in the shape "the image, optionally followed by some written description, geo-location, date and timestamp, and links to individuals (if any) with whom the moment was shared".
And so on.
(And because I feel a bit philosophical right now.)
We all create a lot of stuff. Memories, words, projects, photos, essays.
Some thoughts start in Evernote. Some projects start on Github. Some hacks start on your hard drive. Some doodles start in one of your 5 empty Moleskines. Some great ideas start on your mobile phone's note-taking app.
That's fine - everything starts somewhere. However...
Some photos stay trapped in your phone's /media folder.
Some voice memos stay trapped in WhatsApp.
Some blog posts are scattered over 2 Jekyll installations and 1 FTP site somewhere.
Everything wants to start or end, or be remembered on ₽lato. (in the case of content re-posted to silos, the content almost certainly wants to start on ₽lato)
₽lato - The aggregator for your digital life.
Know where everything is. Know everything you've ever thought of. Know that all your precious memories are somewhere where you can find them.
₽lato will be self-hosted.
Assets will live on a file-system -- the simplest of databases. It is easy to browse with existing tools. It is easy to put together with existing tools, e.g. copy, drag-drop, rsync. It is easy to back up, e.g. right-click / create archive, or cp -R /plato /my/backups.
Your assets might live remotely, so a web API with a window into your filesystem will suffice.
The ₽lato viewer will be web-based. As such, Forms will be served to humans using HTML. Each Form can be customised to look a certain way, e.g. photographs at a high resolution front-and-center, with description underneath, possibly with cinema mode.
Assets will be discoverable. This could be path-based, or using some other meta data system.
Meta data could give more meaning to the basic components of a Form in the form of tags, categories, dates, and links.
- jcs
- Huginn
- IndieWeb projects
- A previous experiment - Basically an experiment in rendering different things from an ElasticSearch cache, and heavily inspired by jcs
+---------------------+
| |
+----------->2FA <--------------+ web API |
| (in) |
+---------+-----------+
YOU |
|
+------------------+ +---------v-----------+ +-----------------+ +---------------+
| | | | | | | |
+-----> local access +------> /plato (DB) +-----> render +-----> serve +------> WORLD
| | | | | | | (out) |
+------------------+ +---------------------+ +-------+-^-------+ +---------------+
| |
| |
+---v-+---+
| |
| cache |
| |
+---------+
Could be a path-based asset cache like ElasticSearch as used in vierkante.
Or "webify".
Turns assets into something that can be rendered on the web.
E.g. go from this:
/plato/Forms/photos/2015/11/17/birthday.tiff
To this:
ls -1 /plato-render/photos/2015/11/17
image.png
image.thumb.png
image.hd.png
index.html
Statically serves /plato-render/index.html and all children.
A secure, authenticated web-based API that will accept Forms and related assets from your good self, either via a web frontend, a mobile app, Twilio, or some other service which is authorised to use it (like IFTTT or Zapier).
The filesystem where RAW assets live. Could potentially effect render via inotify. The DB can live near your web API in the cloud, or locally where your home NAS is already making backups to Amazon Glacier. It shouldn't matter - as long as the world can see your renditions.