offline first

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offline first is a method of developing a website that once a user has visited it once on their device, it will always provide at least some content (posts) and or features (like creating posts) when they revisit even when offline without internet access, using technologies like Service Workers and Local Storage.

IndieWeb Examples

Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith’s primary website: https://adactio.com/ has offline first support so it works when you reload it when you're offline, and can even read some of the articles (whatever it happened to cache from before, including what you browsed)

Tantek

Tantek Çelik’s primary website: https://tantek.com/ has offline first support since 2019-12-08 when he implemented it during IndieWebCamp SF 2019.

Books

• Going Offline by Jeremy Keith, published by A Book Apart
  • Table of Contents for Going Offline
• "Resilient Web Design" by Jeremy Keith is an entire offline first website: https://resilientwebdesign.com/

Articles

• 2013-11-05 Say Hello to Offline First
• 2013-12-03 A List Apart: Designing Offline-First Web Apps

Jeremy Keith has also written prolifically about offline support and offline first development. See:

• adactio.com tag: offline
• 2017-01-11 Making Resilient Web Design work offline
• 2018-04-03 Announcing Going Offline from A Book Apart
• 2018-12-05 Going Offline First (Video Series) review of:
  • 2018-12-05 Ire Aderinokun: Going Offline First (Video Series)
• 2018-12-06 Mistletoe Offline

Projects

• HospitalRun (uses couchdb & service-workers)

More Articles:

• 2019-04: Local-first software / You own your data, in spite of the cloud

Sessions

IWC sessions related to offline first explorations:

• 2019 IWC Brighton session: Local first, offline first vs no cloud and multidevices
• 2019 IWC SF session: Local and Offline Jam

See Also

• offline
• PWA
• http://offlinefirst.org/
• Post: Say Hello to Offline First
• slack channel
• service worker
• local first
• https://ar.al/2020/03/25/apple-just-killed-offline-web-apps-while-purporting-to-protect-your-privacy-why-thats-a-bad-thing-and-why-you-should-care/
• https://andregarzia.com/2020/03/private-client-side-only-pwas-are-hard-but-now-apple-made-them-impossible.html
• local development, as in being able to actually develop offline first, and repeatedly, on different computers, e.g. https://twitter.com/bengoodger/status/1465727343687716873
  • "I had an old computer at home, and so to continue playing with this magic, I’d take floppy disks, and sneaker-net my HTML files back and forth - working on them offline in a text editor, and then uploading them and researching a bunch of new magic when I was online. /12" @bengoodger November 30, 2021
• handwriting, the original user interface of offline first
• Example of a game (Wordle) that is built to work offline until 2026: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1488275144069898240
  • "Hm. Interesting. Just saved a copy of Wordle as "Web Page (Complete)" to my downloads folder, unplugged my computer from the Internet and my local Wordle worked fine. Only problem was the play history didn't carry over (because different localstorage domain)" @mcclure111 January 31, 2022