Topsoil
- 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
Topsoil
Imagine a field or a forest and Topsoil is what you think it is, its the layer that supports a new level of growth. Commons are grass. Users are trees. Each blade of grass is a part of the greater field that kind of growth or the commons kind of represents grass which is generally a means of groundcover that holds the information that we tread upon together. Users are people who care for the field and the trees. Trees are outgrowths from the topsoil. Each tree anchoring its own distinct ecosystem that can participate in the wider commons.
If the grass the commons
The root structures are meeting
Topsoil is the layer for growth and connection.
All sites are still essentially trees.
They are root-bound trees growing in their own pots.
Houseplant and a tree. The major difference being the houseplant has major. Can't get any bigger than the container that holds it. Transplanting that potted plant into topsoil connects the old site with a vast field of information (the commons) transforming it from a singuloar constricted entity (site) into something along the lines of something that has unlimited growth potential. Easily and intrinsically connected to the rest of the commons, free information.
Community garden.
Transplanting an old stunted houseplant into a healthy thriving community garden. Going from depleted soil and a constricting pot to loamy earth that allows for unlimited growth.
Going from one maintainer to a community of gardeners.
Yeah we can transplant your site into something more vibrant.
Am I going to still be able to use it. Webmasters ...
- OfflineEditing
- Indexing
So your topsoil database is append only. You never update anything. But you'd like to index that thing so you can find things later right?
So I'm sitting in a presentation on Solr this awesome indexing thingie . And this guy's created a Ruby Gem called solor-ruby. Very nice.
So what if you used Solr to index your topsoil "database"? It scales big and this solr-ruby Gem is sweet. Just stream the new topsoil records through Solr and then use Solr to look stuff up. Might be just what the doctor ordered.
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.
The user experience is enhanced by
- WYSIWYG editing
- A nice WYSIWYG editor so that editing a web page is a trivial matter
- Offline editing
- Ability to edit web pages when not connected to the Internet. A program running locally on the user's machine will record all edits. The edits will be sent to the server when the user goes online.
Discussion
This is great! Any ideas about what changes we'll be seeing in the next few weeks and which will take months? Thanks! TedErnst
Next
- Plan the migration
- Linking and create page fully working
- Crawling ... ruby webspider
- Formatting buttons working
- Double click or edit button on transclusions