IPFS Search
Clunky, scrambled search results - but interesting to see what’s on IPFS.
I’ve been playing with IPFS to see if I can offer a Kicks Condor experience
there - however,
it’s not exactly clear what the best URL scheme is. Browser extensions somewhat
support ipns://kickscondor.com-style addressing. But it seems like
gateway-style address works better in practice (such as:
http://ipfs.io/ipns/kickscondor.com/.) This is trouble for a
static website, because I kind of need to know where the root directory is - for
images and CSS and stuff. And the gateway URL may end up redirecting to
http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipns/kickscondor.com/.
There’s another search engine at ipse.io, but it appears to contain mostly Chinese search results. I do appreciate that IPFS Search also offers an API, even to get back file metadata for each file. (Like, in the case of MP3s, it returns encoding details - which is a cool idea!)
I found this post the most helpful and straightforward summary of using IPFS on a static site. (Which further pointed me to the free pinata.cloud pinning service, an IPFS service similar to what hashbase.io is for Dat.)
I also have read that Neocities (which also has 1GB free hosting, but on HTTPS as well) puts all of its sites on IPFS, but it seems to be down. The IPFS addresses are no longer on Neocities site profiles and IPNS domain names don’t work.
So, for the time being, the two largest distributed Web protocols (Dat and IPFS) are still rather messy to work with. For Dat, the Beaker Browser still functions, but it’s currently undergoing a major (and sweet-looking) overhaul that we can only cross our fingers over. Paul and Mathias do great work, so should be fine, I’m just getting impatient I suppose.
Oh, one other thing: I fell upon the window.ipfs documentation. The IPFS web extensions add this object to Web pages when they get rendered. It’s similar to Beaker’s APIs for writing and reading files. The full function list is here. Again, I am so impatient.
