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Building Complex Offline Websites Jason B. Jones As an experiment, Ed Summers wanted to build a web application that 1) had a complex, generous interface, incorporating React and 2) could live entirely offline–in fact, could be walked around on a thumb drive. The goal was to make a more sustainable and portable version of the Lakeland Community Heritage Project, which Mary Sies, her students, and community members have been developing. The site originally had been put together in Omeka, but the vicissitudes of campus infrastructure meant that it had to be recreated. Ed's post explains how he got the data out of Omeka, how he organized it, and then how he implemented the web application in React. (Which, once you start thinking about it, is a far from trivial exercise!) Here's a demo of the resulting site, which is very cool: He also explains why it makes sense to think of such a project as an instance of "minimal computing": Static sites, thus conceived, ultimately rely on a web browser, which are insanely complicated pieces of code. With a few exceptions (e.g. Flash) browsers have been pretty good at maintaining backwards compatibility as they've evolved along with the web. JavaScript is so central to a functioning web it's difficult to imagine it going away. So really this approach is a bet on the browser and the web remaining viable. Whatever happens to the web and the Internet we can probably rely on some form of browser continuing to exist as functioning software, either natively, or in some sort of emulator, for a good time to come…or at least longer than the typical website is kept online. If you're at all interested in web development, in maintaining websites, or in how to archive all of these interesting projects people are building these days, it's definitely worth reading the entire post! Photo "USB" by Flickr user mrwynd / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0 RSS to Email Formatted