Federate Everybody

We are going to join all of our wiki sites together into one neighborhood. We'll share pages by forking them so we still have them when the neighborhood disbands.

We will start by sharing a few ip addresses. Then we will look around these sites for more pages we can fork.

You will need to know the IP address your computer is using today. This was assigned when you connected to the WiFi network. We would say that DHCP has leased you the address.

On my mac I would go to System Preferences => Network to find this message for my WiFi connection.

From my laptop terminal I would type ifconfig and look for the inet address in its output.

Find your IP address, combine it with your server's port number, probably 3000. Then see if that works for your personal page url by typing the combination in a new browser tab.

If this doesn't work with your browser, try adding http.

Wiki is prepared to view pages from multiple sites in one tab all at once. In web jargon this is called CORS for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. You will get our sharing started by typing a url that views my page from your site. The url starts with your site, then my site and then my page name as a slug.

Double check that your browser's location still starts with localhost. Also check that you see my page with my flag which should be a different color from yours.

When you start from your site, view cross-origin pages from another site, you can make them yours with fork.

The Fork button is the other button in the lower right corner of each page next to the + button. The fork button has a flag. Hover over fork to be sure the tooltip says "fork this page".

Fork my page. You will see the flag change to be your color. You will also see my flag appear in the history at the bottom of the page. That way you remember where you found the page.

Repeat this process for other people near you. When you have pages for each of your nearest neighbors the hard work is done.

As others are adding their nearest neighbors to their sites we can reuse the work they have already done to connect with more people to grow our neighborhood.

Open a new tab on your own site.

Click on Recent Changes to see the titles of all the people pages you have added to your site.

Slowly click on each name and see what neighbors they have added that you have yet to fork. These will appear in Recent Changes as wiki fetches sitemaps from each page you touch.

Look for people pages you haven't forked. Click on them and fork their pages to your site.

Notice the flags in the bottom right corner of the web page. This is your neighborhood of the moment. The flags spin while wiki is fetching sitemaps. Reload the webpage to reset this and repeat browsing looking for more names.

You may notice that people have updated their pages since you started forking. This shows as newer "twin" flags at the tops of pages. Click the newer flag and fork the page again if you like the improvements.

You can shift-hover over paragraphs to compare pages that have been modified. You can also shift-hover over new entries in the journal to highlight changes.

Watch for a page called Class Roster to appear. Click on it to load the whole class into your neighborhood.

I'll make the Class Roster by finding people pages just like you and then adding them to the roster.

I'll make Class Roster a page of References. I'll add each new person I find by adding a Factory and then dragging the people page Flag to the Factory. I'll be careful to get the page from the correct person's site, not from a forked copy. I can tell the original by looking at the Journal.

The roster will help us find the best new pages when we all start to Dork About Art.