Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, is leading this privacy issue. He is trying to decentralize content so that users house the content separate from commercial apps. Links are provided to the owner’s content so the commercial app can be displayed. Content is controlled by the content owner, a marked change from today.

Today I signed up for a POD from inrupt. There is not much documentation on it, making it difficult to use. I thought that I would write what I have discovered through trial and error.

https://dontai.inrupt.net/

Project Links

Github	Comms	Other
Github/Solid/ Github/User Guide Issues	Solid Chat Solid site-and-docs	Solid Tutorial Wikipedia

Table of Contents

1. Project Links
2. Start Page
3. Input your User Profile
4. Add an Address Book
5. Public Folder: Adding Functionality
6. Public Folder: Deleting Functionality
7. Adding People/WebIDs for Access Control
8. Setting up a Chat, Adding People/Access Control
9. How to Add an Image to your Public Folder
10. Dragging Items from Solid to the Browser Window
11. Solid Password Reset
12. Create a Web Page with Images
13. Other Docs

inrupt admin: admin+security@inrupt.com, security@inrupt.com

Start Page

There’s not much to see yet, but front and center is the security portion of what is public and what is private.

Input Your User Profile

Click on “Profile” and a card title will come up. Mouse over the card title line and icons will appear. On the right side, between “under the hood/Options” and “home” is your “Edit Profile”. Add your info, which will be public. Do not add any private info here.

The icon is much smaller and lighter grey than my graphic, but it will look similar.

To save content you simply hit <enter> and it will save. If it is a text box you simply clock off the text input area and it will save for you. I do not see any “save” buttons.

Add Your Photo to your Profile
There is a black silhouette figure on the top of your profile. You can replace this nondescript bust by simply by dragging and dropping your photo from your computer’s file manager on top of it! Easy peasy! There are no instructions nor any indication this is possible from the UI, but it has nice functionality. A hint would be nice.

Add an Address Book

From the green “+” at the bottom, I created an address book, but had issues adding contacts.

Once you have an address book and before you input a contact you need to create a group, using the “New Group” button. All contacts added without a group will not be displayed and cannot be deleted!

Once you add a new group, highlight it and then you are free to add with a “New Contact”. You can add multiple groups and within the groups, multiple contacts.

I found that I could not edit the contact names after I had saved it, so if you make a mistake you can read it and delete the contact. This is probably because the name is the key and cannot be changed. Contacts are alphabetic from the left of the contact name, so if you wish to have contacts by last name, all your names will need to be entered last name, comma, first name. There is currently no sort ability.

There is a “Tools” button at the bottom, which will give you various options for display. Yes, you can find individuals with no groups but I could not delete them.. The “Load main index” button refreshes your contacts list.

Adding the email address will be red in colour until you use a complete and proper email format. Smart editing, and east to understand.

Note the window on the top right side is a search bar!

Address Book: Deleting Groups and Contacts

If you mouse over the group name you will see a red “do not enter” sign. This is the delete. If you delete a group but not the contacts within it I don’t know what will happen.

To delete a contact go to the bottom of the contact info. Mouse over above the “tools” button. The first delete will be “remove this membership”. When I deleted a contact this way the contact lost its group and I was unable to delete it. Below it you will see a “C” with an arrow going in the right direction. This is the “remove this contact” contact button. Once you hit this you will see a black “X”, “Delete Contact” confirmation. There will be 3 confirmation popup boxes. They REALLY want you to confirm! There is an error message “Error deleting all trace of: ” message, but it does delete. The screen message is too long for the window but I cannot scroll right.

Public Folder: Adding Functionality

Back from the start screen at https://yourname.inrupt.net/, I hit the green “+” at the bottom and added a “Make a New Notepad”, which I called Shared Notes. This was pretty easy.

The typing of content into the input boxes seems to be very slow and missed many of my input characters.

Chinese Input
From the Public Folders area I added a second Notepad and added Chinese characters. The input form, as with English, started skipping input characters, making the Chinese input a bit erratic. When I slowed down typing, which allowed the input form to keep up, it went in ok. Switching between English and Chinese input within a Notepad is no problem.

Public Folder: Deleting Functionality

From your Public folder, highlight the item you want to delete, which might be a chat, a nodepad, or an image. Look for the gear/Under the hood icon, which will tell you the option’s URI, or what you can put into a browser window. Mouse to the left of the refresh button and you will see a red “no go” sign. Click this, and then confirm with a “delete file”. The item will be removed.

Adding People/WebIDs for Access Control

Within your profile at the bottom there is an area to add webids for a social network. It says to drag people to the target bullseye. This is the key to sharing your info with others that have webIDs.

Get the POD URL from your friend and put it into the URL of a browser window. Drag the URL bar icon, the padlock of the browser onto the bullseye at the bottom of your profile, and your friend will be added. My padlock in Firefox is green. Chrome has a grey padlock. It works quite well, but is not so intuitive.

From @timbl: you use drag and drop at the moment. You can type the webid into a browser URL, go to that page , then drag the URL bar icon (typically a padock)) to the target area in the friends list in your profile editor

You can also drag their nick straight from a message they put in a chat.

Or from where you find them in an ACL list or a group, or basically anything in solid should allow uyou to drag them.

Here is a successful add of a webID.

Setting up a Chat, Adding People/Access Control

From your public you hit the green “+” and add a chat by giving it a name. Mouse up to the chat line and the sub-options will appear. One of the options, sharing, looks like a wifi icon on its side. This is where you add your people. I call this the Access Control List, or ACL.

The standard ACL is you can do everything and the world can read. There is a button to add more ACL options. There are a couple of categories in the ACL but they are pretty standard. To add people to your chat ACL they need to be friends in your Profile, where you already added their webids (see above). From your profile card, at the bottom, which lists your friends, drag and drop a friend into the ACL category for the chat. When you hover over it the ACL category will turn grey. You can move a person from one group to another with drag and drop. It is that simple.

In the end this Chat, with a friend’s webID in the Poster ACL, did not work. The URL for the chat can be found from the gear icon “under the hood”, in the chat menu.

Example: Public Chat
Here are some screen captures of a test public chat, from robertgk. I had to know the person’s chat URL to view the chat. In order to participate I needed to login with my webID.

I believe that all the content is stored in our individual pods, but the chat pulls it together using linkages, but I am unsure.

How to Add an Image to your Public Folder

You simply drag and drop the image onto the large green “+” sign, and you are done! Thanks @eamiralian! I don’t know how to delete the image!

The URL for the image is: https://dontai.inrupt.net/public/your-image.jpg . All spaces are replaced by “-“.

Dragging Items from Solid to the Browser Window

Unique to Solid, for me, is the ability to drag items from Solid into a browser tab, and a the Solid item’s URL appear in the URL bar. Here’s an example, where I drag an item from my Public folder and drop it into a new browser tab:

Solid Password Reset

I don’t know if this works but you could try: inrupt.net, solid.community There is an outstanding issue

When logging in, don’t use your email address, just your username. Ditto for the Reset Password option. Just use your username and not your email address. If there is an error on your reset password, you will not receive an error message, just nothing will be returned to you.

Password resets these days seem to only use email addresses, because user IDs can be forgotten. I put in my email address by mistake. Maybe it should accept both? What happens if you have multiple accounts?

Create a Web Page with Images

Here’s what we’re going to do: we will set up a directory for images, add images, create an .htm document, then add some html to link the page to the images. Then we’ll view the web page with its unique web page URL.

Create an folder for your images
From the bottom of the Public folder page, hit the large green “+”, then select the file folder “Make a new folder@@”. I don’t know what the @@ means. Name your folder “images”. You should see this folder in your Public folders. Click on the grey triangle to the left of “images” You will see that your images folder now has a green “+”. From your computer’s files system, drag and drop your images onto the green “+”. The files will now appear in your images folder.

Your Image URIs
But what is the image’s URIs? How can you use them in a web page? Click on an image file name, then mouse to the image’s title line. Select the gear/Under the hood. Below the refresh symbol in the middle you will see the URI, “https..” something. This is the URI we will use to call the image in the html page. In my case the Uri is “https://dontai.inrupt.net/public/images/solid-logo.png”

Create an html web page
You should now have an images folder with some images. You should now know the URI of your images. Now we create a web page. From the bottom of your Public folder, hit the large green “+” and select the “Make a new source@@”. Again, I do not know the meaning of the “@@”. Name your new page “test-html.htm”. You should see the new page now appear in your Public folders.

Click the test-html.htm page. Hover on that line for options. Select “Source”. Click on the little pencil in the bottom right side, for edit mode. Enter your html, and save it. If you don’t know HTML then you’ll need to learn it!

Of course my HTML will be different from yours, so there’s no need to copy it. You tried to copy my image, didn’t you? No, it will not work.

Display your Web Page
From your Public folder, open your test-html.htm file, hover on the file name, and select the gear “under the hood”. Copy the URI. In my case it is https://dontai.inrupt.net/public/test-html.htm

Put this URL into a browser tab and see your web page!

Other Docs

Financing

@pmcb55 06:58
Someone asked a little while ago about Mastercard’s connection with Solid, so just to make it clear, Mastercard merely helped get the Solid project off the ground with a $1M gift back in 2015. It was not an investment, and so Mastercard makes no claims whatsoever in relation to anything related to Solid – it was literally a donation. This was fully public, and announced here:

Solid startup funding from Mastercard

Open Source License

solid/solid.mit.edu is licensed under the MIT License: A short and simple permissive license with conditions only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code. source

Problem: Public Notepad Display
So I logged out of my pod and refreshed the URL https://yourname.inrupt.net/, hit the public folder and here’s what I saw: blacked out lines. I checked the permissions and I can RWED, everyone else should be able to read but not change.

It turns out that the text colour is black but the background colour is also black. I can highlight the text, which turns the background to orange.

The Purpose of Solid
From the Solid website you can read about the purpose of Solid. As I learn more about Solid we can start to differentiate the vision and the implementation, which, over time, will change.

You decide where you store your data: Solid gives you a place to store your own data. This is true. Solid provides a place far from the free providers such as Google and Facebook, where you can store your own images and files. Your POD can be on your laptop, your own host provider or server. No one will mine your information.

You’re free to move it at any time: future plan

You give people and your apps permission to read or write: I know they are working on this, but it is not quite there yet.

What Needs To Happen

• How to Store More Complex Data: Images and small html files are nice, but how do we store more complex data, such as huge tables?
• Need for Developers to use Solid as a Data Store: There will need to be developers that create code to use Solid. Solid will be the repository but will not develop the code for the functionality we all want.
• Widespread Adoption: Everyone will need a globally unique webID. How will these IDs be coordinated in countries such as China, where the English level is not very high.

Indexed on Google Search 2018-Oct-03
José Pedro Dias – https://josepedrodias.inrupt.net/
Eli Camhi – https://ecamhi.inrupt.net/
Justin Bingham – https://justin.inrupt.net/
Henri-Pierre Chavaz – https://hpchavaz.inrupt.net/
Stefano Bertolo – https://stefano.inrupt.net/
Ralph Steyer – https://rjsedv.inrupt.net/
John Bruce – https://johnb.inrupt.net/
Julia Ballas – https://julia.inrupt.net/
Roland Legrand – https://hirothegargoyle.inrupt.net/
Indexed on Google Search 2018-Oct-05
José Pedro Dias – https://josepedrodias.inrupt.net/
Eli Camhi – https://ecamhi.inrupt.net/
Justin Bingham – https://justin.inrupt.net/
Henri-Pierre Chavaz – https://hpchavaz.inrupt.net/
Stefano Bertolo – https://stefano.inrupt.net/
Ralph Steyer – https://rjsedv.inrupt.net/
John Bruce – https://johnb.inrupt.net/
Julia Ballas – https://julia.inrupt.net/
Roland Legrand – https://hirothegargoyle.inrupt.net/
Tony Siino – https://tonysiino.inrupt.net/
Don Tai – https://dontai.inrupt.net/
boB Rudis – https://hrbrmstr.inrupt.net/
inuro – https://inuro.inrupt.net/
anarcho-copy.org – https://anarcho-copy.inrupt.net/

Juan Ortiz Freuler https://juanof9.solid.community/
Teodora Petkova https://teodora.solid.community/
Ruben Verborgh https://ruben20180801.solid.community/
Tony Siino https://tonysiino.solid.community/
Kürdistan https://kurdistan.solid.community/
Peter K Steiner https://petersteiner.solid.community/
Tom Fraser https://tomwgf.solid.community/
Om Design https://omdesign.solid.community/
bellbind https://bellbind.solid.community/
Matthias Evering https://ewing.solid.community/
anarcho-copy.org https://opensource.solid.community/
Hans Lachman https://hans.solid.community/
anarcho-copy.org https://turkiye.solid.community/
anarcho-copy.org https://istanbul.solid.community/
Noorul https://beapal.solid.community/
Amro https://amro.solid.community/
Andrew Wooldridge https://triptych.solid.community/
Isriya https://markpeak.solid.community/
Simon Worthington https://mrchristian.solid.community/
jon richter https://yala.solid.community/
Stacie Arellano https://metahari.solid.community/
anarcho-copy.org https://turkey.solid.community/
Heinz Wittenbrink https://heinz.solid.community/
bunnyhero https://bunnyhero.solid.community/
Robert Peake https://rpeake.solid.community/
alex_mayorga https://alex_mayorga.solid.community/
北市真 https://kitaitimakoto.solid.community/
Ankara https://ankara.solid.community/
Alexander Rodrigues Silva https://alexrodrigues43.solid.community/
Ruben Verborgh https://ruben.solid.community/
Schaun https://sob.solid.community/
Kingsley Idehen https://kidehen.solid.community/
Mihail Bakunin https://bakunin.solid.community/
webcredits https://webcredits.solid.community/
Diyarbakır https://diyarbakir.solid.community/
Chris https://chris.grieger.solid.community/
Ruben (Just Works) https://ruben-just-works.solid.community/