The name cirodown should not appear anywhere now, except with very few exceptions, e.g.:
I have also squatted OurBigBook on all major social media handles for near future usage, e.g.: twitter.com/ourbigbook and so on.
I was going to do this sooner or later, it was inevitable, but the timing was partly triggered due to noticing that English speakers (and likely many other nationalities) are not able to easily read/hear/pronounce "Ciro".
After breaking production and sweating for a bit hotfixing (not that anyone uses the website yet), I decided to be smart and created a staging server: ourbigbook-staging.herokuapp.com. Now I can blow that server up as I wish without afecting users. Documented at: cirosantilli.com/ourbigbook/staging-deployment
After something broke on the website due to SQLite vs PostgreSQL inconsistencies and took me a day to figure it out, I finally decided to update the test system so that OURBIGBOOK_POSTGRES=true npm test will run the tests on PostgreSQL.
Originally, these were being run only on SQLite, which is the major use case for OurBigBook CLI, which came before the website.
But the website runs on PostgreSQL, so it is fundamental to test things in PostgreSQL as well.
One of the key advances of the previous update was to show include headers on the table of contents.
This was to allow splitting source files freely.
While that goal was in principle achieved in that commit, when I went ahead to split the huge index of cirosantilli.com into multiple files, I notice several bugs that took a week to fix.
After all of these were solved, I finally managed to split the README at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/commit/84c8a6e7fdbe252041accfb7a06d9b7462287131 and keep the previous desired output. You can now see that the README contains just:
\Include[ciro-santilli]
\Include[science]
\Include[mathematics]
\Include[technology]
\Include[art]
This split led to a small positive modification of the output as follows. Previously, a section such as "Quantum Electrodynamics" would have been present in the monolithic README.ciro as:
= Quantum electrodynamics
If you visited cirosantilli.com/quantum-electrodynamics, you would see see a link to the "nosplit" version, which would link you back to cirosantilli.com#quantum-electrodynamics, but that is not great, since this is was a humongous page with all of the README.ciro, and took long to display.
After the split, = Quantum electrodynamics is present under science.ciro, and the nosplit version is the more manageable cirosantilli.com/science#quantum-electrodynamics.
The key changes that were missing for that to happen were:
Currently, none of the crucial cross file features like \x, \Include and table of contents are working. I was waiting until the above mentioned features were done, and now I'm going to get to that.
And do 5 big queries instead of hundreds of smaller ones.
For example, a README.ciro document that references another document saying:
The \x[speed-of-light] is fast.
needs to fetch "speed-of-light" from the ID database (previously populated e.g. by preparsing light.ciro:
= Light

== Speed of light
to decide that it should display as "Speed of light" (the title rather than the ID).
Previously, I was doing a separate fetch for each \x[] as they were needed, leading to hundreds of them at different times.
Now I refactored things so that I do very few database queries, but large ones that fetch everything during parsing. And then at render time they are all ready in cache.
This will be fundamental for the live preview on the browser, where the roundtrip to server would make it impossible
E.g.:
README.ciro
= My website

== h2

\Include[not-readme]
not-readme.ciro
= Not readme

== Not readme h2
the table of contents for index.html also contains the headers for not-readme.ciro producing:
This feature means that you can split large input files if rendering starts to slow you down, and things will still render exactly the same, with the larger table of contents.
This will be especially important for the website because initially I want users to be able to edit one header at a time, and join all headers with \Include. But I still want the ToC to show those children.
This was a bit hard because it required doing RECURSIVE SQL queries, something I hadn't done before: stackoverflow.com/questions/192220/what-is-the-most-efficient-elegant-way-to-parse-a-flat-table-into-a-tree/192462#192462 + of course the usual refactor a bunch of stuff and fix tests until you go mad.
github.com/cirosantilli/node-express-sequelize-nextjs-realworld-example-app contains the same baseline tech as OurBigBook, and I have been use to quickly test/benchmark new concepts for the website base.
I'm almost proud about that project, as a reasonable template for a Next.js project. It is not perfect, notably see issues on the issue tracker, but it it quite reasonable.
The side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved once again? I to actually make the project be more important thatn the side effects this time, but we'll see.
Since the last update, I've made some major improvements to the baseline tech of the website, which I'll move little by little into OurBigBook. Some of the improvements actually started in OurBigBook.com. The improvements were:
Arkarya by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Name of the clade of archaea plus eukarya proposed at: www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2015.00717/full. Much better term than prokaryote as that is not a clade. Let's hope it catches on!

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact