As part of our latest development project with the Guardian Project team, we have re-engineered the Butter Box portal interface. This post describes the design choices and improvements within the new portal.

Previously, the interface was a static site built with Jekyll, which offered no customisation options and was ill-suited for the portal’s dynamic requirements. It has now been replaced with a Python Flask application, a lightweight framework that allows developers to include only the necessary libraries, such as for localisation, minimising the application’s footprint.

Read the full post on the SR2 blog

We have released a small, self-contained sample podcast content pack, built on a webpage and RSS feed from Guardian Project. This repository is intended as an example "content pack": a minimal, portable bundle of everything needed to host and distribute a podcast, including episode audio, show notes, a landing page, and a standards-compliant feed.

DOWNLOAD SAMPLE PODCAST CONTENTPACK

What's inside​

• index.html : A simple, styled landing page that lists each episode with inline audio playback.
• podcast.xml : An RSS 2.0 feed with iTunes podcast extensions, suitable for submission to podcast directories and use in podcast players.
• posts/*.md : Per-episode show notes in Markdown (YAML frontmatter holds the episode metadata).
• posts/*.mp3 : The episode audio files, colocated with their show notes.
• build.sh : Regenerates index.html and podcast.xml from the contents of posts/.

WebXDC apps are marketed as "Secure mini apps for chats". They are supported by a variety of secure messagings apps, but primarily Delta Chat. As we recently added support to ButterBox for offline communication via DeltaChat and built-in ChatMail server, we though it made sense to also have a content pack for distributing an excellent collection of offline ready apps you can run inside your groups chats.

The content in this pack comes from webxdc.org and apps.testrun.org. All rights and permissions to the content are as stated on those sites and in their respective source code repositories.

DOWNLOAD WEBXDC CONTENTPACK

We have just wrapped up a project with the Guardian Project team exploring options for connectivity to allow for updates to software and content on the Butter Box and for communications between users of multiple Butter Boxes. We have explored two technologies: LoRA and WiFi HaLow.

Read the full post on the SR2 blog