New articles - OurBigBook.com

For example, at docs.ourbigbook.com/news/article-and-topic-id-prefix-search article search was added, but it only finds if you search something that appears right at the start of a title, e.g. for:

Fundamental theorem of calculus

you'd get a hit for:

fundamental

but not for

calculus

To do this efficiently, we need full text search, which PostgreSQL implements.

But finding a clean way to generate test data for testing out the speedup was not so easy and exploration into this led me to publishing a few new slightly improved methods where Googlers can now find them:

unix.stackexchange.com/questions/97160/is-there-something-like-a-lorem-ipsum-generator/787733#787733 I propose a neat random "sentence" generator using common CLI tools like grep and sed and the pre-installed Ubuntu dictionary /usr/share/dict/american-english:
```
grep -v "'" /usr/share/dict/american-english |
shuf -r |
paste -d ' ' $(printf "%4s" | sed 's/ /- /g') |
sed -e 's/^$.$/\U\1/;s/$/./' |
head -n10000000 \
> lorem.txt
```
- to achieve that, I also proposed two superior "join every N lines" method for the CLI: stackoverflow.com/questions/25973140/joining-every-group-of-n-lines-into-one-with-bash/79257780#79257780, notably this awk poem:
  seq 10 | awk '{ printf("%s%s", NR == 1 ? "" : NR % 3 == 1 ? "\n" : " ", $0 ) } END { printf("\n") }'

stackoverflow.com/questions/3371503/sql-populate-table-with-random-data/79255281#79255281 I propose:

a clean PostgreSQL random string stored procedure that picks random characters from an allowed character list

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION random_string(int) RETURNS TEXT as $$
select
string_agg(substr(characters, (random() * length(characters) + 1)::integer, 1), '') as random_word
from (values('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-    ')) as symbols(characters)
join generate_series(1, $1) on 1 = 1
$$ language sql;

first generating PostgreSQL data as CSV, and then importing the CSV into PostgreSQL as a more flexible method. This can also be done in a streaming fashion from stdin which is neat.
```
python generate_data.py 10 | psql mydb -c '\copy "mytable" FROM STDIN'
```

stackoverflow.com/questions/16020164/psqlexception-error-syntax-error-in-tsquery/79437030#79437030 regarding the safe generation of prefix search tsquery from user inputs without query errors, I've learned about websearch_to_tsquery and further highlighted a possible tsquery -> text -> tsquery approach that might be correct for prefix searches
stackoverflow.com/questions/67438575/fulltext-search-using-sequelize-postgres/79439253#79439253 I put everything together into a minimal Sequelize example, read for usage in OurBigBook

Finally I did a writeup summarizing PostgreSQL full text search: Section "PostgreSQL full-text search" and also dumped it at: www.reddit.com/r/PostgreSQL/comments/12yld1o/is_it_worth_using_postgres_builtin_fulltext/ for good measure.

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Test tagger 21 by

Barack Obama 11  Updated 2025-04-18  +Created 2024-12-23

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This is a section about Test tagger 21!

Test tagger 21 is a very important subject about which there is a lot to say.

For example, this sentence. And then another one.

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Test tagger 20 by

Barack Obama 11  Updated 2025-04-18  +Created 2024-12-23

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This is a section about Test tagger 20!

Test tagger 20 is a very important subject about which there is a lot to say.

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Test tagger 19 by

Barack Obama 11  Updated 2025-04-18  +Created 2024-12-23

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Test tagger 18 by

Barack Obama 11  Updated 2025-04-18  +Created 2024-12-23

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This is a section about Test tagger 18!

Test tagger 18 is a very important subject about which there is a lot to say.

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Test tagger 17 by

Barack Obama 11  Updated 2025-04-18  +Created 2024-12-23

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This is a section about Test tagger 17!

Test tagger 17 is a very important subject about which there is a lot to say.

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Test tagger 16 by

Barack Obama 11  Updated 2025-04-18  +Created 2024-12-23

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This is a section about Test tagger 16!

Test tagger 16 is a very important subject about which there is a lot to say.

For example, this sentence. And then another one.

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 Pinned article: ourbigbook/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!

Video 1.

Intro to OurBigBook

. Source.

We have two killer features:

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
Video 2.
OurBigBook Web topics demo
. Source.
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:
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
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 2.
You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website
.
Figure 3.
Visual Studio Code extension installation
.
Figure 4.
Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
.
Figure 5.
Web editor
. 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.
Video 4.
OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
. Source.
Internal cross file references done right:
Infinitely deep tables of contents:
Figure 6.
Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
.
Live URL: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate
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

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