Pre-Released as Free Software on the AGPL, Lit.OTG could herald a new type of fightback against a surveillance industry that doesn't know when to stop.
Our trust, hope and optimism strategy has failed. It's time those door-slamming gatekeepers had a taste of their own medicine. The ingredients? One browser, one offline app, one firewall…
The 2020s. Where the Web's entire infrastructure is under Silicon Valley's capture. Where every new "privacy tool" sits perched, by design, over an arterial data flow, breathlessly sucking in the same data-tornado as Big Tech, while its providers pretend they're not selling the spoils to the usual suspects.
There's a limit to the number of times you can watch the same bullshitters pull the same strokes before you start taking your digital welfare into your own hands. And in this environment, there's only one genuine way to stay clear of the surveillance machine. Cut the cord. Work offline.
NEW TIMES
Twenty-five years ago, the notion that anyone would want to firewall a Web browser would have raised only laughs. But today, as creatives see their intellectual property subjected to an unprecedented scale of corporate theft, staying out of the tech corporations' reach is about more than just privacy.
Twenty-five years ago, no one was silently "background-saving" writers' work to remote servers without consent - i.e. stealing it. Twenty-five years ago, no one was "session-recording" those same writers' working methods and selling them to anti-human AI vendors whose goal is to roboticise creativity for $trillions in profit.
Lit.OTG is new, highly experimental, and certainly not perfect. But no one can take something like this away from you. You can't be banned. It can't shut down. Free Software is yours, and your rights of access to this package are legally protected by the AGPL.
Data-theft is now standard on Web platforms. Add in all the gatekeeping, the content-kidnap, the unjust bannings, the rug-pulls, the status-shaming, the algorithmic piss-pumping, and a level of snooping that is quite seriously damaging to people's mental health, and you have a dystopia from which any sane being would want to escape.
ENTER Lit.OTG…
I'm a writer, musician and digital image-maker, and I'm the first to admit that I have the mathematical capabilities of a lager-saturated doughnut. At 3am. Under a sofa cushion. I never envisaged myself as a JavaScript programmer, but enough is enough, and if we don't start building our own way out of this cultural disaster zone now, it's never gonna happen.
So I coded up a cross-platform, browser-based HTML-authoring app that works offline. It creates lightweight, single-source, JavaScript-free Web pages, full Distribution packages for offline consumption, and even entire websites that support truly independent browsers.
It's new, it's untested, and my own contribution to it is definitely not a masterstroke in elegant coding, but it seems to do the job. It's one step down the road to freedom from the ugly tentacles of surveillance capitalism. I'm sharing it with everyone who wants it.
I've called it Lit.OTG, short for Literature Off The Grid. You can see a demo of the output on this Neocities page.
The idea behind the program is not just to preserve a genuinely private writing space, and begin extending that privacy to the reader too. It's additionally to shift the centre of software control away from wannabe dictators, into the hands of individuals, so that no power-crazed admin gets to decide what we can and can't read; what we can and can't write.
So why didn't anyone think of doing this before? Actually, they did. In the '80s and '90s, nearly all software was under individual users' control, and other than shouting scary words in licence agreements, there wasn't a fat lot corporations could do about it.
Then the WWW caught on, and a bunch of "entrepreneurs" realised they could make $billions exploiting the public as free-labouring, brainwashable lab rats over a network instead. That was the end of privacy, integrity and morality.
BUILD DIY, FIREWALL YOUR BROWSER
But Lit.OTG comes in at the dawn of a new era. An era in which we begin to play the tech corporations at their own game. The landlords of cyberspace have spent two and a half decades cajoling developers into building open source software to line other people's wallets. But we, the public, are just as entitled to those free software components as they are. And we can play the door-locking game too.
Lit.OTG incorporates some existing open source components that have, over the years, been used by, and even made by, tech corporations. Components like Showdown, Prettify and Genericons. Any member of the public has as much right to harness those powerful software components as Big Tech. Which means that even people like me, who failed their basic maths exams and were told there was no way in Hell they could ever program computers, can feasibly build DIY applications.
And we, the mathematical chuckouts, went on to become society's rebels. We don't respect rules dreamed up by the Cybertech Cartel.
Indeed, Lit.OTG breaks pretty much every rule that the cyberpowers of Surveillance Valley have spent the past 25 years drumming mercilessly into developers.
- Thou shalt ALWAYS use a server when making HTML content.
Server out on its ass. App still works.
- Thou MUST, by the Holy Law of Santa Clara Profit Margins, ALWAYS embed six squillion corporate dependencies into each and every page thou dost author.
Zero corporate dependencies. Output still works.
I'll spare you the full list, but Lit.OTG really is different. Here's what it can do…
Remember Opera version 7.11, b. 2003? You're quite old if you do. Join the club. But a Timeless page created with Lit.OTG has no trouble at all rendering with correct layout and full aesthetic quality in these old browsers.
There's also a powerfully resilient page design called Minimal, which will render readably in just about any browser you can find. But you don't have to live your life in ye olde worlde of Web 1. The Uplit theme strikes a balance between modern expectations and strong browser support. And when I say browser support, I mean browsers in any state of operation. Browsers with content-blockers, browsers with JavaScript disabled, browsers with drastic amendments to their privacy settings…
And Lit.OTG doesn't just make single pages. It can make full, static websites, or pseudo-websites that can be consumed offline. The pseudo-websites are the only Lit.OTG output type that does require JavaScript to load, but offline, JavaScript doesn't carry the dangers it carries on the Web.
MEET Lit.OTG
In the Lit.OTG Editor, you get a Markdown pane on the left, and a preview pane on the right. As you type Markdown into the left hand pane, your output appears in real time on the right, skinned with your selected theme. You can preview your post full-screen and assess how the finished page will look to your readers.
You initially save your posts to a private content vault called a Project, on your local drive.
Then, when your project is ready for public viewing, you export it to output formats. You can export standard Markdown, individual Web pages, an index, an offline Distribution that showcases the entire project in a pseudo-website format, or an extractable file, which can be instantly converted into a fully-structured website.
Lit.OTG stores both its main markup framework and its content database in a single HTML file. I was assured that this was insane, but is it as insane as downloading 1GB plus of React dependencies via an enforced "package manager" that's basically spyware, to artificially accomplish something that plain HTML could do 25 years ago without any dependencies at all?
JAVASCRIPT ONLY WHERE IT'S NEEDED
For years we've been descending into a hellscape of very real conspiracy, organised and bankrolled by Silicon Valley giants whose aim is to make the entire Web inaccessible to anyone who chooses to protect their privacy and security.
Said companies have for long been busy teaching and/or brainwashing developers to use software and methods that will necessarily exclude perfectly good HTML browsers from online resources, and only allow through Big Brother's programmatical, spyware-friendly, security-compromising tools.
All Web-destined Lit.OTG pages are totally free from JavaScript, and that affords access to an extremely wide range of browsers. When pages don't use JavaScript, visitors not only get better privacy and greater protection from scamware - they also have the option to use browsers that are not controlled by Surveillance Valley stalkers.
HANG ON A SEC'
Before you download and start using Lit.OTG, here are some things you need to know…
- The app itself has a minimum screen-width of 820px and is not designed for use on phones. However, the output you produce with it responsively scales to any device size.
- After you download, extract the folder, go inside, and click project.html to launch the app and the demo project. It will open in your default browser unless you right click and select a different browser.
- The app needs JavaScript and first-party cookies enabled in order to run. It doesn't use cookies, but does heavily use local storage, which in most browsers shares permissions with cookies. If you only use a browser extension to block JavaScript, you shouldn't need to change its settings. Extensions block network traffic, and Lit.OTG is local so it doesn't use a network. But broadly, if opening project.html gives you a blank page, it's because JavaScript is unavailable. If JavaScript is available but local storage is unavailable you should see a message in your browser window.
- Although some of the output has extremely wide browser compatibility, you need a fairly modern browser to run the app itself. For operational reasons, I recommend that you use Firefox or a Firefox derivative. And if you're using Firefox, for privacy reasons I recommend that you install a separate, portable instance of the browser, and firewall it. No Internet, no spying.
- You'll need to know Markdown to write in Lit.OTG, but the app's internal documentation will help you, and you should know enough to get started within about 15 minutes.
- When writing a post you need to begin with an h1 heading in Markdown. That's your chosen post title prefixed by a single hash and a space. For example: # This is the Title. The app uses post titles to manage the contents of the project.
If we firewall our browsers… If we support independence… If we make, control and possess our own software… We can still turn this around.
DOWNLOADS AND REPO...
Download in Zip format (latest push)
Download in Tar.gz format (latest push)
The latest pushes contain the very latest updates and fixes almost as soon as they're performed. I fix a bug or make an improvement and send the new code straight through to Codeberg, and you'll automatically get that newest code via the links above. Because the package has no binary code and it runs as source, the pushes are fully usable without any need for compiling. They're just like the releases, except they have no version number and they probably have one or two fewer bugs, a couple of extra improvements, etc.
Download in Zip format (latest release)
Download in Tar.gz format (latest release)
The code in the latest releases is not usually as recent as the code in the latest pushes. The releases have a longer testing period before they're finalised, but at this early stage there are lots of fixes and improvements to make, so the pushes are likely to be better versions. You can access the Codeberg repository via the link below, and select from any of the older releases via the Releases tab.
The app's repository on Codeberg
You can let me know about problems via the form on the Contact Page, and I'll do what I can to address them.