Spherical coordinate system by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Spin experiments by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Relaxation oscillator by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Lisa Su by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Spin quantum number by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Materials science by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Spintronics by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Video 1.
Introduction to Spintronics by Aurélien Manchon (2020)
Source.
Isaac Newton by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's mother by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Ciro's Edict #5 / Next steps by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
  • upload all of cirosantilli.com to ourbigbook.com. I will do this by implementing an import from filesystem functionality based on the OurBigBook CLI. This will also require implementing slit headeres on the server to work well, I'll need to create one Article for every header on render.
  • get \x and \Include working on the live web preview editor. This will require creating a new simple API, currently the editor jus shows broken references, but final render works because it goes through the database backend
  • implement email verification signup. Finally! Maybe add some notifications too, e.g. on new comments or likes.
Although most of the key requirements were already in place since the last update, as usual doing things with the complex reference content stresses the system further and leads to the exposition of several new bugs.
The upload of OurBigBook Markup files to ourbigbook.com was done with the newly added OurBigBook CLI ourbigbook --web option. Although fully exposed to end users, the setup is not super efficient: a trully decent implementation should only upload changed files, and would basically mean reimplementing/using Git, since version diffing is what Git shines at. But I've decided not to put much emphasis on CLI upload for now, since it is expected that initially the majority of users will use the Web UI only. The functionality was added primarily to upload the reference content.
This is a major milestone, as the new content can start attracting new users, and makes the purpose of the website much clearer. Just having this more realistic content also immediately highlighted what the next development steps need to be.
Once v1.0 is reached, I will actually make all internal links of cirosantilli.com to point to ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli to try and drive some more traffic.
The new content blows up by far the limit of the free Heroku PostgreSQL database of 10k lines. This meant that I needed to upgrade the Heroku Postgres plugin from the free Hobby Dev to the 9 USD/month Hobby Basic: elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql, so now hosting costs will increase from 7 USD/month for the dyno to 7 + 9 = 16 UDS/month. After this upgrade and uploading all of cirosantilli.com to ourbigbook.com, Heroku dashboard reads reads:
  • 30,918 rows out of 10,000,000
  • 61.0 MB (out of 10 GB)
so clearly if we are ever forced to upgrade plans again, it means that a bunch of people are using the website and that things are going very very well! Happy how this storage cost turned out so far.
One key limitation found was that Heroku RAM memory is quite limited at 512MB, and JavaScript is not exactly the most memory economical language out there. Started investigation at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/230 Initially working around that by simply splitting the largest files. We were just on the verge of what could be ran however luckily, so a few dozen splits was enough, it managed to handle 70 kB OurBigBook Markup inputs. So hopefully if we manage to optimize a bit more we will be able to set a maximum size of 100 kB and still have a good safety margin.
Ciro's Edict #7 / Insane links and parents by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Ciro's Edict #8 / List topics on home page by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
The new default homepage for a logged out user how shows a list of the topics with the most articles.
This is a reasonable choice for default homepage, and it immediately exposes users to this central feature of the website: the topic system.
Doing this required in particular calculating the best title for a topic, since it is possible to have different titles with the same ID, the most common way being with capitalization changes, e.g.:
JavaScript
Javascript
would both have topic ID javascript.
With this in place we also added the preferred topic title to the top topic page.
The algorithm chosen is to pick the top 10 most upvoted topics, and select the most common title from amongst them. This should make topic title vandalism quite hard. This was made in a single SQL query, and became the most complext SQL query Ciro Santilli has ever written so far: twitter.com/cirosantilli2/status/1549721815832043522
Figure 1.
Screenshot showing the list of topics
. The page is: ourbigbook.com for the logged out user, ourbigbook.com/go/topics for the logged in user.
Figure 2.
Screenshot showing a topic page
. The page is: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/vector-space. Before this sprint, we didn't have the "Vector Space" at the top, as it wasn't necessarily trivial to determine what the preferred title would be.
Ciro's Edict #7 / Issue tracker by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Every article now has a (very basic) GitHub-like issue tracker. Comments now go under issues, and issues go under articles. Issues themselves are very similar to articles, with a title and a body.
This was part of 1.0, but not the first priority, but I did it now anyways because I'm trying to do all the database changes ASAP as I'm not in the mood to write database migrations.
Here's an example:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/OurBigBook_issue_list_on_article_page.png
2D Ising model by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created

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!
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