When I saw the latest act mission, I jumped for joy. Finally, something I was actually moderately good at—programming. I was also intrigued by the special challenges that a dark site faces—it has to be able to be hammered by traffic, but yet stay readable, functional, and informative. So, what came out of all of that?
I just whipped up
DarkBox, what I like to call a dark site in a box. It allows anyone to handle the creation of a dark site-type site seconds, leaving you to the actual management of the site and handling of the information, something that would be much more important than your server crashing when you're in the middle of a crisis.
So, how do you use it? It's really simple. Just download DarkBox, unzip it onto any modern web server, and you're good to go! The page can be added to by someone with no technical experience—all they have to do is create text files in a directory. If you're so inclined, you can also add some more advanced features by editing the script itself or adding HTML files. Plus, if your site is vital—being accessed by an entire country, or maybe being accessed by people on their phones—you can simply direct people to the ultimate bandwidth saver: a
totally plain text site. There's no loss of functionality going to plaintext, though—because DarkBox uses
Markdown, even the source is totally readable and not obfuscated by any type of code.
So, give it a try if you're inclined! Remember, it's (like most of my other work) extremely beta and untested, so don't hesitate to leave bug reports.
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