Page App

For a while, I used Urbit's Page App to host HTML sites hosted on Urbit to the clearweb. Page App lets you create a public website. I fake "encrypted" mine in order to present a front-end website from a back-end browser in a way that makes the clearweb/dApp divide feel less obvious. The panel of QR codes either implies that users will need more than one device to access content or this design will make the device itself increasingly visible to a "user".

I sunk a lot of hours into creating cool gates from Urbit to Wiki and back again using a visual system based on ~navluc-latmes' secure QR code generator.* But urbit apps hosting art and other professional content haven't been made reliable. This creates technical debt for the user when she ends up feeling used but not for a good cause. Urbit has a lively and generous development community. Don't do what I did and try to host a grad school application on Landscape: they will make fun of you for assuming that the platform is this stable.

I wanted a simple way to trouble the assumptions around public and private on the web (or front-end and back-end or exhibition and archive). On the less conceptual side of things, this turned out to be a great way to present a body of work that will never be made consistent, either on instagram or on square space.

I learned something about my art practice here, especially when I accrued so many QR codes I lost track of which ones led to where, and had to start over: that my work relies on consistency of documentation, more than it does on presentation, to be legible. Eventually I used graphviz -- Grid Template -- to drag and drop the QR codes onto discrete pages, after which it became much easier to index this design without having to repeat the pointers and bring it down to 10 links. This would have required brute force were it not for FedWiki's page structure, because each page slug is assigned an identifier as unique as a QR code. Nice that the multicolored flags don't get lost in the tabs.

Eventually I wanted to have a working ship more than I wanted to have a "public website", so when I updated my kernel and lost access to the developers app that hosted the page via [socryn-pinfeb.ve3.info socryn-pinfeb.ve3.info], I figured I might as well host it on FedWiki even though the .html was scraped from Page App. I recognized that it doesn't matter to me as much when something breaks when it's FOSS even when it might be harder to do.