WebUI, browser add-on or Native client for IPWB

[DonaldTsang]

It would be great if IPWB has either:

• A WebUI for interacting with the WebUI provided by IPFS
• A browser add-on that interacts with ipfs-companion
  • Allows for one-click archiving using the add-on widget
  • Automatic website archiving similar to Biased News Boycotter
• A native client similar to https://github.com/Siderus/Orion
  • Having actual integration with Orion if possible
  • Is able to archive whole blogs if needed

[machawk1]

Hi @DonaldTsang. Thanks for your suggestions!

Is there some particular aspect or feature of the IPFS WebUI that you think would be useful to communicate with from ipwb?

While I think a browser add-on is currently out of the scope of our core efforts of ipwb, I think it might be useful as another means of communicating with the ipwb backend. We have considered integrating the preservation process and feel there are plenty of tools that already generate web archives. Integration with these tools to make the archiving-to-replay process more seamless has always been an ultimate goal. You may want to check out https://github.com/machawk1/warcreate for another tool that will allows preservation from the context of the browser (via a Chrome extension).

The concept of a native client is also interesting, as we want to remove technical barriers in potential users installing and using the tool. We originally did this with https://github.com/machawk1/wail as an example of generating a native binary from Python code, so are familiar with that process. However, because of issues of maintainability (among other reasons), @N0taN3rd rewrote the aforementioned app in Electron as https://github.com/n0tan3rd/wail.

[DonaldTsang]

@machawk1 Well the WebUI for IPWB should be similar to archive.org or archive.fo to make it easy for people to save webpages, but it can be extended to whole websites.

[machawk1]

@DonaldTsang ipwb is "A distributed and persistent archive replay system using IPFS", not a tool to perform the preservation process.

[machawk1]

Providing ipwb as a stand-alone binary is redundant of #72.

[DonaldTsang]

@machawk1 But, it should be considered as an essential part of the WWWW-to-WARC-to-IPFS process.

[machawk1]

@DonaldTsang Ultimately, perhaps, but the current scope of ipwb is the WARC↔IPFS component. Plenty of other tools perform the WWW→WARC task (preservation) and WARC→(archived version of)WWW task (replay).

On your comments above, archive.org/.is/.fo provides separate interfaces for preservation (Save Page Now) and replay (Wayback Machine). There may be potential to combine these and provide some Mink-like functionality of providing a quantitative measure of how well the page has been preserved in other sources prior to the preservation (creation of a WARC) and dissemination (push to IPFS, ipwb's current functionality) processes.

I believe @ibnesayeed (the other primary ipwb developer) is against adding a preservation component to ipwb for the sake of cohesion of ipwb as an archival replay system.

[DonaldTsang]

Perhaps, but I would that there is a dire need for WWW-WARC-IPFS for common archival purposes (for the public to save and share blogs and news articles), and for future reference see https://github.com/Siderus/Orion/issues/133