I am enjoying writing with a workflow that I call a __Personal Farm__. This workflow was not really possible before we had the ability to search easily for page-titles across multiple sites, and greater control of rosters. With a few more tweaks it will probably be my preferred way of writing in wiki, and the one I recommend to new authors.
# Categories as sites
The basic idea is that we start to use the ability to create new sites quickly as a radical way of categorising our writing. A new federated wiki becomes like a category of pages in wikipedia, or a folder on your desktop for organising your documents.
# Wild card plus identity file
When we configure a site as a server farm with wild card DNS, and combine this configuration with associating an identify file in the config.json for a particular domain - that domain becomes a personal farm. Directing the browser to a new subdomain automatically creates the new site and claims is as your own wiki.
This process is fast and seem-less. If you are already logged in then you will automatically be logged into to the new site you just created and claimed ready to write. It is the speed of this process that makes it an effective partner to new forms of writing workflow.
Here we show an example of how you would configure your config.json for a personal farm:
I'm not sure a relative path works - so use a full path for the "david.json" file. I have a folder with all authors login details. You can essentially copy the structure of the owner.json that wiki creates in the normal process of claiming a site, file and move it over to the new folder (renaming it so you can remember which author it is). All new sites can refer to this file.
"bullshido.academy": { "id": "~/.wiki/owners/david.json", "google_clientID": "xxxxx", "google_clientSecret": "xxx_xxxxxxxx" },
# Subdomains and active rosters
Active Rosters allow us to write freely and create as many subdomains as we wish as we can remain connected to the other sites. Whenever a new site is created, the active roster automatically displays a new roster for the new extended set of subdomains hosted on your server.
This only works on servers that are configured to work with the Roster Transport like the Atopia Server. However we hope that a new class of Federated Server will support such research group based workflows.
# Active is not permanent
We are exploring the relationship between active rosters, and more reliable, loosely coupled, or standalone versions of wiki that we view or write in more slowly. In these wiki's we do not wish to be dependent on active rosters which may or may not be present in the future. See Permanent Wiki.
# See also