View Remote Pages

You've probably noticed that some of these pages have a "blue halo" around them. This means that the data of the page is being served from a server other than the one from which you're browsing (your Origin Site).

It's worth getting the conceptualization of this right, because it violates expectations you have about the web.

In federated wiki, we seperate the concerns of data retrieval, data storage, and UI.

Your site's data (e.g. your pages) are stored on a server you own. Usually you will browse pages with this site as your Origin Site meaning any changes you make to documents are stored on that server.

Data can be retrieved, however, from any federated wiki site and displayed as a page.

When you are looking at a page that is being served from somewhere other than your current write context, that page will have a "blue halo". Edits to such a page will be saved to your write context (making the copies of the pages to your server, and making the blue halo disappear).

Right now, for instance, your Lineup probably has a number of pages in it. Your Origin Page is (hopefully) from your own server. This page probably has a blue halo, and is being served from the orientation server that I run.

Importantly, this page is not even passing through your server to get to you. Your browser is directly pulling different pages from different servers and stitching them together in the interface. More on that later.