No Dot, Just DAT.

In this little blog we will be going over Dat a p2p way of sharing files, folders, website and things of that nature.

"Ever tried moving large files and folders to other computers? Usually this involves one of a few strategies: being in the same location (usb stick), using a cloud service (Dropbox), or using old but reliable technical tools (rsync). None of these easily store, track, and share your data over time. People often are stuck choosing between security, speed, or ease of use. Dat provides all three by using a state of the art technical foundation and user friendly tools for fast and encrypted file sharing that you control."

This is the introduction to dat documentation, and it's pretty fun to play around with and is a great way to share things p2p. Sharing source files to others to share and edit is easy, straightforward and takes no actual coding knowledge.

Dat also compares themselves to a git in the documentation saying " Cloud services, such as Dropbox or GitHub, force users to store data on places outside of their control. Until now, it has been very difficult to avoid centralized servers without major sacrifices. Dat's unique distributed network allows users to store data where they want. By decentralizing storage, Dat also increases speeds by downloading from many sources at the same time."

This is actually exactly what we were looking for not long ago when we were looking to host our large Virtualbox Application that is around 5 gigabytes (That can now easily be downloaded from our dat site) and I think a general great way to share games, images, programs and more p2p.

Getting Started.

To start viewing dat sites hosted by peers you simply need a compatible dat browser like Beaker Browser. 

Once you have installed a dat compatible browser you can explore dat sites like ours here: dat://93c984ad3912db01cc270828b7a9a7ff8ced1013c7f8d2c475f1ac0405b8809f

Playing with dat

Now the real fun starts as you don't actually need to install dat to start your own little page and download the website just a dat browser.

Step 1.) Right click on the page and select "view source" in the page menu.

Step 2.) Make an edible copy of the site via the page tools.

Step 3.) Edit/customize the pages from the files.

Step 4.) Seed the new files.

Step 5.) View your site.

Step 6.) Download the files.

To continue to host your site you will need to install the dat program and run it under the downloaded file as presented in the dat docs.

If you are already using dat you can also clone our site using the 'dat clone' command, if you have beaker but not dat you can use our git to get going, if you don't have any start this blog again!

Closing

I think this is a great little program and is very fun to play with. I will indeed keep an eye out for cool apps and updates to the program and hope you have found this blog to spark your interest. Please feel free to ask questions and get involved in the comments if you liked or are interested in the program I am no expert but am glad to help.