Make an Index Page

Index pages are used as entry points into your site's content. In pedagogical uses of federated wiki it can also function as a portfolio of student work. Here we show you how to make one.

So you made a Internal Link on Welcome Visitors to your index page last time. It might have looked link this as source:

And something like this in the page:

Teaching Machines (Mike Caulfield)

Click your link (not the one above here) and you'll get something like the image here. It will be a "ghostly" page that says "We could not find this page." Next to that will be a button labelled "Create". Press it.

This creates the page.

Index pages are used a lot of ways in federated wiki, but in this Happening we will use them to collect new articles we've written and articles to which we've substantially contributed.

From the point of view of a teacher, this page would be where you would go to see a selection of a students work for assessment purposes. From the point of view of a reader, this might be a page you go to to get a sense of what sorts of things this person writes.

So let's create two headings.

First, add a "Factory" on the page by clicking the plus button. You'll get a gray area like this you see here.

Click on the grey area, but not on any of the links in the gray area. It should turn into a text box.

We're going to make a paragraph now about this page. The first paragraph of a page is called the synopsis, because it will also be what shows up as a page summary in search results. Write with this in mind.

Here, let's write the following:

When you're done hit Enter. This will save your paragraph and give you a new one.

Now let's make a heading. In the textbox type:

We're using heading three because the title of each page is in heading 2. It's not ideal, but it works. And given there are multiple pages on your screen maybe it makes sense.

Hit enter or Alt-S to save your heading.

To transform it into HTML, hold down shift and double-click the block.

Next we'll make an encyclopedic page.