How I built 1208.sh, a Keybase-style identity page with Bitcoin as the notary
If you were online around 2016, you probably remember Keybase. You linked your Twitter, your GitHub and your website to one cryptographic key, and anyone could check that all those accounts belonged to the same person. Keybase made the idea popular, and other projects kept it alive: Keyoxide does it with plain OpenPGP, and Adam Newbold built proven.lol around the same concept. This one started at work. I wanted something like proven.lol for my company: a page where clients could confirm that a domain, a profile or a PDF really came from us. While sketching it, I kept thinking about my own scattered online life. More than twenty domains, Mastodon, Bluesky, GitHub, Flickr, Lobsters, Hacker News. So I forked the idea for myself, and it became 1208.sh. It was a lot of fun to build. Part of the fun was the look. I didn't want another dashboard, so the page is designed like a certificate, with a guilloché rosette, blue verification seals and a pen-style signature. The other part was the plumbing, and most of the plumbing is about time: who signed what, and when.
