The page you're reading right now lives somewhere a little different from most of the web. Ronhelwig.com is built with Decent Site, a tool I've been making so that people can truly own their websites: not rent them, not borrow them, but own them. I want to tell you what it is, how it works in plain terms, and where it stands today.

![Three layers of Decent Site](/assets/decent-site-layers.png)

## Why I built it

Most websites today depend on somebody else. A hosting company, a platform, a blogging service. That works fine until it doesn't: a price goes up, an account gets locked, a service shuts down, or the rules change overnight. Your words were yours, but the place they lived never really was.

I've been building things for a long time, and I kept coming back to one simple idea: if you write something and put it on the web, you should be the one who decides what happens to it. Decent Site is my attempt to make that real.

## How it works, in plain language

You don't need to understand the technical pieces to use Decent Site, but it helps to know the shape of it. There are three layers.

**The record of ownership.** Information about your site, like who owns it and which version is current, is kept on Dash Platform. Think of it as a public, tamper-resistant record that says "this site belongs to this person, and here is the latest version." No single company or government can quietly change it.

**The content itself.** Your actual pages and pictures are stored on IPFS, a shared network for storing files. Storage in Decent Site is designed to be pluggable, so IPFS is the option in use today, but the design isn't tied to it forever.

**The front door.** A small program called the Stub takes all of that and serves it up as ordinary web pages. Visitors don't need special software or a crypto wallet. They just type in an address, like ronhelwig.com, and the site shows up like any other.

## Writing and publishing

Here's what it looks like from the writer's side.

![Write, preview, approve, go live](/assets/decent-site-publish-flow.png)

**Write.** You write your pages in Markdown, a simple way of formatting plain text. A pound sign makes a heading, asterisks make words bold, and that's most of what you need. You can write in the Decent Site Admin app on your own computer — it has a built-in editor — or bring Markdown from another editor if you prefer. Admin also includes an AI assistant that can help you draft content and shape how the site looks.

**Preview.** The same Admin workspace lets you draft, build, and preview your whole site on your own machine. That part is free. You can tinker as much as you want and nothing goes public until you decide it's ready.

**Approve.** When you're ready to publish, you approve the change on your phone or tablet using the Auth app (Android for now). This is the key to the whole thing: only you can change your site. Even if someone got hold of your computer, they couldn't publish over your work without that approval.

**Go live.** Publishing costs a small fee in Dash, which pays for recording the new version on Dash Platform. Then your updated site is out in the world.

## Respect for readers, too

Owning your site is half the story. The other half is how it treats the people who visit.

Decent Site doesn't track visitors. There are no hidden analytics scripts following you around, no profiles being built, nothing quietly phoning home. You read the page, and that's it.

Every page also has a Markdown version, the plain-text original behind the nicely formatted page. That's on purpose. It's handy for people who prefer simple text, and it makes the site easy for AI tools to read accurately instead of guessing their way through a cluttered page. If assistants are going to read the web on our behalf, I'd rather give them clean words than a mess.

## Staying readable when a domain is blocked

A normal website dies if its domain name gets taken down or blocked. Decent Site's design separates your site's identity from any one domain or host: the ownership record and content live on networks that aren't controlled by a single landlord.

Planned next is a **Browser Stub** — a reader (including as a browser extension) that can find and open your site from that ownership record, even if the usual domain stops working. The idea is simple: if someone blocks the name on the street sign, people can still reach the building by its address book entry. That work is still ahead of us, but it's a core part of where Decent Site is going, because ownership without a path around censorship isn't ownership worth having.

## Where things stand

I want to be straightforward about this, because honesty matters more to me than hype.

Decent Site is working, and it's live. This very site runs on it on Dash mainnet, the real network, not a test version. You may have noticed the footer that says "Published with Decent Site." That's not a promise about the future; it's describing what's happening right now.

That said, it's not finished. Some pieces, including parts of the payment side and shared contracts that would make it easier for many people to use the same building blocks, are still in progress. And some of the setup is still technical. If you're comfortable with a command line, you can get going today. If you're not, it's fair to say Decent Site isn't quite ready for you yet, but making it ready for you is exactly where I'm headed.

## For technical readers

If you want to look under the hood, the code is public:

**[https://git.ronhelwig.com/rhelwig/DecentSite](https://git.ronhelwig.com/rhelwig/DecentSite)**

There you'll find the source, along with details on how the Dash Platform metadata, the pluggable storage, the Stub, and the Auth approval flow fit together. Questions, bug reports, and ideas are all welcome.

## What's next

My goal is simple: anyone who wants a website should be able to have one that's truly theirs. Write on your own computer, approve from your own phone, and know that nobody can pull the rug out from under you.

We're not all the way there yet, but this site is proof that it works. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned. There's more to come.

![Decent Site wordmark](/assets/decent-site-wordmark.png)