Difference between revisions of "Topsoil"

Summary

Topsoil is a new tool that will allow you to take your old static webpages and transform them into a dynamic, informationally rooted website. If your website were a tree and you were the gardener, topsoil would be the rich loam that you could depend on to keep your tree flourishing and connected to the growing web.

The idea of a webmaster is obsolete. Webmastered sites are like vases of cut flowers: the only way to keep them fresh is to continually buy more flowers. What is the point of paying someone for flowers you can grow with less effort yourself?

Imagine instead a community garden. The joy of gardening is getting your hands dirty, working with the earth to create new life within the world that you live in. The topsoil gives you a rich base for your site to grow in, and the community provides the tools and helping hands you need to care for the plants that you love.

Unpacking the Metaphor

The idea behind topsoil is that there is grass and there are trees. Grass refers to the AboutUs commons, i.e. stuff that belongs to everyone. Trees, on the other hand, are external websites that AboutUs hosts in a special way. Users can have their websites slurped in by AboutUs so that it gets wiki-ized. A big edit button appears on every hosted page so that the user can easily edit pages the wiki way. Also, the AboutUs commons becomes available under the user's domain name and the user's branding and styling can be applied to the commons so that the look stays coherent.

• Grass is the AboutUs commons
• Trees are websites that target a specific audience
  • Signal to Noise ... Filter Recent Changes
  • Branding ... your own url, your own skin
  • Easy linking with the commons

Details

Topsoil is a distributed collaboration application that runs on top of a network of Bedrock servers and web browsers.

The Topsoil Toolshed includes the following collaborative editing tools

• Spade the WYSIWYG page editor with easy linking and transclusion capabilities
• Fork a source code editor with syntax highlighting, automatic indentation, and autocomplete
• Kaltura movie editor
• Clippers SVG figure editor

See also

• Community ... how we work together
• Content
  • Canopy ... external websites that AboutUs hosts in a special way
  • Groundcover ... the shared content layer
• Toolshed ... for lack of a better name
  • CoTor ... collaborative text editing
    • WYSIWYG ... so that editing a web page in place is trivial
    • SourceEditor ... so that editing html, css, javascript, and ruby is a joy
  • SketchVG ... collaborative drawing
• ElectricSheep ... wander around harvesting bits to compost
• Topsoil ... the application layer
  • ObjectDatabase
  • RelationalDatabase
  • OfflineEditing ... edit your pages even when not connected to the Internet ... synch up when you come back online.
  • Indexing
  • SimultaneousEditing
  • WidgetTransclusion ... CommunityProgrammableWiki
• Bedrock ... the federated server infrastructure
  • Storage
  • Processing

Mockup

Next

• Plan the migration
• Linking and create page fully working
• Crawling ... ruby webspider
• Formatting buttons working
• Double click or edit button on transclusions