neverendingbooks

I’ve re-installed the Google analytics plugin on december 22nd, so it is harvesting data for three weeks only. Still, it is an interesting tool to gain insight in the social networking aspect of math-blogging, something I’m still very bad at…

Below the list of all blogs referring at least 10 times over this last three weeks. In brackets are the number of referrals and included are the average time Avg. they spend on this site, as well as the bounce back rate BB. It gives me the opportunity to link back to some of their posts, as a small token of gratitude. I may repeat this in the future, so please keep on linking…

Not Even Wrong (69) : Avg (1.05 min) BB (52.94%)

The most recent post of Peter is an update on the plagiarism scandal on the arXiv.

The n-category cafe (63) : Avg (2.13 min) BB (50%)

The one series I followed at the cafe lately was the Geometric Representation Theory course run by John Baez and James Dolan. They provide downloadable movies as well as notes.

Richard Borcherd’s blog (47) : Avg (1.53 min) BB (53.19%)

It is great to see that Borcherds has taken up blogging again, with a post on the uselessness of set theory.

The Arcadian functor (32) : Avg (3.45 min) BB (34.38 %)

It is clear from the low bounce-back rate and the high average time spend on this site, that Kea’s readers and mine have common interests. Often I feel that Kea and I are talking about the same topics, but that our language is so different, that it is difficult for me to spot the precise connection. I definitely should start (for myself) a translation-project of her M-theory posts.

RupertGee’s iBlog (23) : Avg (6.48 min) BB (34.7 %)

Surprisingly, and contrasting to my previous rant iTouch-people (or at least those coming here from Rupert Gee’s blog) sure take time to read the posts and look for more.

Ars Mathematica (22) : Avg (0:01 min) BB (77,2 %)

Well, the average time and bounce back rate say it all : people coming here from Ars Mathematica are not interested in longer posts…

iTouch Fans Forum (14) : Avg (2:07 min) BB (42.86 %)

Again, better statistics than I would have expected.

Vivatsgasse 7 (13) : Avg (1:51 min) BB (38.46 %)

I hope these guys haven’t completely given up on blogging as it is one of my favourites.

Sixth form mathematics (12) : Avg (1:40 min) BB (25 %)

My few old posts on LaTeXrender still draw referrals…

Strategic Boards (12) : Avg (0:01 min) BB (91.67 %)

People in strategic board games are not really in my game-posts it seems…

The Everything Seminar (11) : Avg (2:04 min) BB (72.73 %)

Greg Muller has been posting a couple of nice posts on chord diagrams, starting here.

Noncommutative Geometry (11) : Avg (3:36 min) BB (27.27 %)

Well, we are interested in the same thing viewed from different angles, so good average times and a low bounce back rate. Maybe, I should make another attempt to have cross-interaction between the two blogs.

Over the last two weeks Ive ported all old neverendingbooks-post from the last 4 years to a nearly readable format. Some tiny problems remain : a few TeX-heavy old posts are still in $…$ format rather than LaTeXrender-compatible (but Ill fix this soon), a few links may turn out to be dead (still have to check out those), TheLibrary-project links do not exist at the moment (have to decide whether to revive the project or to start a similar idea afresh), some other techie-things such as FoaF-stuff will be updated/expanded soon, et. etc. (and still have to port some 20 odd posts).

Anyway, the good news being that we went from about 40 posts since last july to over 310 posts, all open to the internal Search engine. Having all this stuff online is only useful if one can browse through it easily, so I wanted to install a proper up-to-date archive-plugin…

The current theme Redoable has build-in support for the Extended Live Archives v0.10beta-r18 plugin which would be ideal if I could get it installed… Im not the total newbie in installing WordPress-plugins and Ive read all the documentation and the support-forum and chmodded whathever I felt like chmodding, but still no success… If you know how to kick it into caching the necessary files, please drop a comment!

The next alternative Ive tried was the AWSOM Archive Version 1.2.3 plugin which gave me a pull-down menu just under the title-bar but not much seems to happen when using bloody Safari (Flock was OK though). Maybe Ill give it another go…

UPDATE (jan. 9th) : The AWSOM Archive seems to be working fine with the Redoable theme when custom installed in the footer. So, there is now a pulldown-menu at the bottom of the page.

**UPDATE (jan. 12th) : Ive installed the new version 1.3 of AWSOM Archive and it works from the default position **

At a loss I opted in the end for the simplest (though not the most aesthetic) plugin : Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives. This provides a year-month scheme at the top followed by a reverse ordered list of all months and titles of posts and is available as the arXiv neverendingbooks link available also from the sidebar (up, second link). I hope it will help you not to get too lost on this site…

Suggestions for a working-from-the-box WordPress Archive plugin, anyone???

Here a list of pdf-files of NeverEndingBooks-posts on games, in reverse chronological order.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here a list of pdf-files of NeverEndingBooks-posts on general topics, in reverse chronological order.

Read the rest of this entry »

No math

today. If you’re interested in the latest on noncommutative geometry,

head over to the NCG-blog where Alain Connes has a post on

Time.

Still, Alain’s post is a good illustration of what Ill be rambling about

TeX and how to use it in a blog.

If you’re running a math-blog,
sooner or later you want to say something more than new-age speak like
‘points talking to each other’ and get to the essence of it. In short,
you want to talk math and it’s a regrettable fact that math doesnt go
well with ASCII. In everyday life we found a way around this : we all
use TeX to write papers and even email-wise (among mathematicians) we
write plain TeX-commands as this language is more common to us than
English. But, plain TeX and the blogosphere don’t mix well. If you’re
expecting only professional mathematicians to read what you write, you
might as well arXiv your thoughts. Im convinced the majority of people
coming here (for whatever reason) dont speak plain-TeX. Fortunately,
there is technology to display TeX-symbols on a blog. Personally, I was
an early adapter to
LaTeXRender and even today a
fair share of page-views relates to the few
posts I did on
how to get latexrender working on a mac. Some time ago I
switched to mathML and now I’m
regretting I ever did…

Mind you, I’m convinced that mathML is the
‘proper’ way to get TeX to the internet but there are at the moment some
serious drawbacks. For starters, it is highly user-unfriendly. You
simply cannot expect people to switch browsers (as well as installing
extra fonts) just because they come to your site (or you have to be a
pretty arrogant git). Speaking for myself, Im still having (against my
better judgment) Safari as my default browser, so when I come to a site
like the n-category cafe I just
skim the plain-text in between and if (and only if) the topic interests
me tremendously I’ll allow myself to switch to Flock or Firefox to read
the post in detail. I’m convinced most of you have a similar
surfing-attitude. MathML also has serious consequences on the
server-side. If you want to serve mathML you have to emit headers which
expect everything to follow to be purified XHTML. If I ever forget a
closing tag in a post, this is enough to break down NeverEndingBooks to
all Firefox-users. I’ve been writing HTML since the times when the best
browser around was something called NCSA Mosaic so Ive a
pretty lax attitude to end-tags (especially in IMG-tags) and Im just
getting too old to change these bad habbits now… It seems I’m not the
only one. Many developers of WordPress-plugins write bad XHTML-code, so
the last couple of weeks I’ve been spending more time fixing up code
than writing posts. If you want to run a mathML-wordpress site you might
find the following hints helpfull. If you get a ‘yellow screen of
death’ when viewing your site with Firefox, chances are that one of your
plugin-authors missed a closing tag in the HTML-rendering of his/her
plugin. As a rule of thumb : go for the IMG-tags first! I’m sorry to
say, but Latexrender-Steve
is among the XHTML-offenders. (On a marginal note, LaTeXrender also has
its drawbacks : to mathematicians this may seem incredible but what
Latexrender does to get one expression displayed is to TeX an entire
file, get the image from the ps-file turn it into a gif and display it,
so one gets a GIF-folder of enrmous proportions. Hence, use Latexrender
only if you have your own server and dont have to care about memory
constraints. Another disadvantedge was that the GIFs were displayed with
a vertical offset, but this has been solved recently (use the ‘offset
beta’ files in the distribution)). Wrt. to that offset-beta version, use
this latex.php file instead (I
changed the IMG-line). Some plugins may not serve the correct headers
to display mathML. So, if you want to allow readers to have a
printer-friendly version of your mathML-post, get the WP-print plugin BUT
change to this wp-print.php file in order to
send the proper headers. Sometimes there are just forgotten lines/tags
in the code, such as in the [future calendar plugin](http://anthologyoi.com/wordpress/plugins/future-posts-calendar-
plugin.html). So, please use this version
of the future.calendar.php file. And so on, and so on. The joys of
trying to maintain a mathML-based blog… So, no surprise I’m seriously
considering to ditch mathML and change to normal headers soon. One of
the things I like about LaTeXRender is that it can be extended, meaning
that you can get your own definitions and packages loaded whereas with
mathML you’re bound to write iTeX, which Ill never manage. But, again,
mathML will be the correct technology once all major browsers are mathML
capable and the font-problem is resolved. Does anyone know whether
Safari 3 (in Leopard, that is Mac OS 10.5 to the rest of you) will be
mathML-able?