Summary

Dave Winer has been developing applications that support users owning their own data. His latest is a blog page rendering system he calls MyWord.io.

WORDS

I simply love MyWord.io from Dave Winer. This is such a simple, beautiful idea. Like all such, it seems obvious once you've seen it.

MyWord.io is JavaScript for rendering a blog page (or any page, for that matter) from a JSON description of the contents in the style that Medium pioneered.

To understand it click to the example JSON file of an article on Anti-Vaxxers and then use MyWord.io to render the contents of the JSON file. MyWord.io also supports Markdown.

The magic here is that there's no server running a Web app in the style of Web 2.0. Neither is there an API. The JSON file is on Dropbox and could be hosted anywhere. The "application" is all JavaScript running in the browser. The JavaScript could also be hosted anywhere too since Dave has shared the source code on Github.

This is an example of what I've been calling a person cloud application architecture (PCAA). The key idea is to separate the application from the data and allow the data to be hosted anywhere the owner chooses. The advantage is that there's no central server intermediating the interaction.

Dave's on a roll here. I wrote about his nodeStorage project a few week ago. I'm heartened that developers like Dave are building applications that support people being in control of their own data rather than having to surrender it to the database of some company and be forced to interact with it through the company's administrative identity.


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Last modified: Thu Oct 10 12:47:18 2019.