Topsoil
Topsoil is a new tool which 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The idea of a webmaster is obsolete.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 toolshed provides the items you need to maintain and care for the plants that you love. When you take a holiday, the community weeds your patch and waters the plants you're caring for. When you notice spots on leaves, you've got friends know how to treat it.
- 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
- OfflineEditing
- Indexing
- SimultaneousEditing
- WYWIWYG ... WIKIWYG
- Distributed
- Bedrock ... the server infrastructure
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