WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki — Issue #52: create a bibliographic link as a story item type
Author: WardCunningham
Created: 2011-10-17 06:45:29+00:00
State: open

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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.