Personalization

Let's lead new site owners to a personalization page where they can configure a new site within bounds that preserve the federated wiki look and feel.

See About Flagmatic Plugin for an example of a brand preserving control.

Lets make the default background be a plaid of the chosen flag as I have done with simple css. site site

I know some are not thrilled with this background which can come out rather extreme for some flags.

Lets make a 'Backmatic' plugin that will upload an image of the user's choosing. I suggest we continue squeezing images so that they transfer quickly. Also, we can blur a squeezed image which will make the low resolution serve any size screen.

We should also work out concrete advice for making who and what pages. And for setting up or using Rosters that will find good community quickly.

The main issue here is that of Deference. Fedwiki excels in terms of deferring to content over interface. The interface is minimal and uncluttered. While this has problems to do with ease of use, in that the functions of the tool are not immediately transparent to the user - this is the way forwards in the age of a computer literate gaming culture. We should not lose this whatever happens.

A partial solution I believe is to have Modes. While it is important to be aware of the site of origin of content, this should not intrude into teh experience of reading and writing. But a Learner Mode is compatible with this idea.

The idea is as follows. Reading - the public and openly accessible act of reading a site should be standardised and minimal, but the view an author has of their own content while logged in can be as they wish.

An author can therefore choose to have a Distraction Free Mode, or a Background Origin Mode or a Learner Mode, without interfering with the viewer and reader function of other sites as they pull in content.

How to achieve this?