It’s been a long time coming.
For at least a year now I’ve dreamt of having a digital homestead where not only would all my activities be documented for myself and others, but it could also provide a locus for my own private draftings and research (access restricted) and, a locus for public collaborative content creation. This site is built with TWiki and is actually one big wiki, despite looking also like your stock static site and blog. This archetecture gives me the flexability of covering almost every web base – static broadcast, blogging, forum, wiki, etc. I’ve yet to employ all these capacities, but soon come.
Riffing on Cory Doctorow’s Outboard Brain, I’m intending to extend this idea to its natural maximum – my life’s activities documented largely in the public arena in a medium which allows for feedback, collaboration and expansion by the collective intelligence. For at least a year now I’ve dreamt of having a digital homestead where not only would all my activities be documented for myself and others, but the site would also provide a locus for my own private work as well as more public collaborative content creation. I think I’m nearly there!
This site is built with TWiki and is actually one big wiki, despite giving the appearance of a static site and blog. The (T)wiki architecture gives me the flexibility of covering almost every web base – static broadcast, blogging, forum, wiki, etc. though I’ve yet to employ all these capacities, but soon come.
I’ve been using an access restricted wiki for drafting content for over a year now and I’m totally converted into a full blown wiki head – in that most of my work that once would have been Word files centrally stored on my laptop, are now wiki pages, decentralised and accessible to any computer with web access (oh, and Open Source!). Once I’ve got the basics up here, I will begin exploring more collaborative drafting on this site, both for ‘serious’ research, as well as for fun and general explorative creations.
A quick word on this blog’s architecture: I’m trailing this lovely approach which renders various categories to their relevant content portals across the site. So, while this post was created and is listed in the main blog index, it also renders on the home page which renders the most current posts in the News category. This spreads my one blog across this entire site, dividing it up by relevance and effectively carving it up into many smaller blogs, while retaining the capacity to browse all posts from one location.
Oh, and while I might have conjured this site’s architecture up from the wispy ether based on my past experiences with TWiki, it was entirely Marcus Leonard that made it possible – thank you, you are my knight in shining armour!!!
Any thoughts on this site so far?