create a bibliographic link as a story item type

[WardCunningham]

A natural way to add a new site to the federation is by citing content on that site in the form of bibliographic references. It is my intention to add a new story item type and corresponding plugin to the set of basic types. I imagine this will include reference specific fields for things like title, favicon, and text annotations. One server could keep track of other servers by recording remote page size, date of last update, observed update frequency, and so on. I can assume that travelers through the federation will find pages worth forking by reading bibliographies assembled by others.

• Wikipedia notes: Webography or webliography are bibliographies of websites. The first use of the word "webliography" recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from June 1995.

I have refactored the factory drag-and-drop code to make it easier to add new drop subjects. The html5 api is notorious for its complexity but dropping links from a browser's location bar of reading links from desktop weblocs both seem doable.

• https://developer.mozilla.org/En/DragDrop/Recommended_Drag_Types#Dragging_Links

I'm assuming it is possible to recognize when a server is serving federation compatible content. I suggest simply following a dropped link and look for JSON content that meets federation format. I would check for a title that is a string, a story that is an array, and an optional journal that its also an array. Further, I could check that the story items have types and ids and that the journal actions have types drawn from a familiar set (add, remove, move, edit).

It might be reasonable to expect all sites to offer a bibliography of valued sites much like bloggers enumerating their blogroll.

[SvenDowideit]

/me looks for the microformat spec, and finds nothing :/

this idea is a nice bit of magic.

[WardCunningham]

I look forward to replacing the List of Pioneers with a federated bibliography constructed from these items. I'm close. Um, maybe I should just edit some json and write the plugin instead of dwelling on the drag-and-drop.

{ "type": "webloc",
  "url": "http://uwiki.me",
  "title": "New Simplest Federated Wiki Install",
  "text": "Static apache file server site - no server side script at all, and so properly read-only. Maintained by [[Sven Dowideit]]"
}

[asolove]

I like the idea of articles containing executable data. We could agree, for example, on a couple of articles that have json content that all wikis are expected to have:

• About: a listing of metadata about this server. It could be used to identify the server name, author, favicon, and that the server is open to federation.
• Peers: a listing of other federated servers this wiki knows of, similar to the bibliography at the end of a book. Forking a page from a server automatically adds it to your list of peers.
• Collaborators: a similar listing, representing servers that this server's author particularly pays attention to. The client could use this information to present a GitHub like interface. When you bring up a page, it lets you know if a trusted collaborator has made updates to their version of the same page, so that you can easily pull them back.

[WardCunningham]

312b9e8 adds bibliographic references plugin and add [[List of Pioneers]] page. I like Alan's suggestions for automatically creating these lists.

[WardCunningham]

2fea025 completes one narrow path through drag-and-drop construction of federated webographies. Some conditions:

• works for chrome and safari
• adds link to right-most viewed wiki page
• prefetches page json to construct good citation
• requires CORS enabled target server (see http://enable-cors.org/)