cryptograffiti.info Updated +Created
twitter.com/cryptograffiti (marked as joined March 2014)
Bitcoin blockchain image indexer and uploader. Uses fake P2PKH address.
At some point it stopped using Bitcoin mainline and moved to Bitcoin Cash instead: www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/cryptograffiti-rejects-bitcoin-core-bch-now-available-payment-method/ and therefore became useless. Existing indexes seem to have been broken as well.
Also, based on the timing of Figure "Erich Erstu", this service may be responsible for a large part of the raw JPEG images present in the blockchain from block 416527 (2016) onwards. This is also suggested by the comments at Figure "Tank Man".
A Quantitative Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin gives the interesting insight that all its transactions seem to return change/fees to one or two given addresses, thus making it very easy to list all their uploads if they were consistent! So all we need are some starting points, which we have mostly due to ASCII mentions of the site on known inscriptions, all of which have a few common spent addresses at the very end:
so we just have to solve get all Bitcoin transactions from and to a given address and we are done. Blockchair shows about 800 entries as of February 2024, between 4f94f97eb156b8563a213bb292314a0bd9c95b39afc521fc5965d050daab2a78 (2014-03-02) and ac5f4ea03597b43a72fb8ab42bd5384629f87f4f4abc534f38b8c15148ccaf9f (2017-10-12): blockchair.com/bitcoin/outputs?s=time(desc)&q=recipient(1MVpQJA7FtcDrwKC6zATkZvZcxqma4JixS)
Other related transactions:
TODO understand what these are:
  • ae92dc4c31943955ad6e3e45a4eb0067f488fdd9aecca65c946460dd2a85488d
  • 3020dbd7c850bf8c19ebacf670a2830fe50999a8b2560a202af21d536760eea4
  • d65384a21cb1c327cc42416a0b1e2a78ad0296cb7a15312bdcd67ef169ecb309
  • a3e3100d2b9a86e310430945c001df97a70626220a9e151208aecbb613f1f152
  • a9c82ebc47fabd1eed7eeea7760d0a3c99288af3c3a17e396ec790fc280698a2
  • 92bfd5c0fb0f24efa6ca568c4475f44e94dfc8d0d4d5da04dfafc6261bf17f45
  • 73c22adb21b93f9220d00d2614a50350824be95b8ea966349e6f35fe5ac5537b
  • 099c0fd06d18953c886121ff143ea0a20d0baf29999f424fa1ac707a81cf4987
  • 3ad6677303fb6f700a4f2f977fe86e5324e0ddb0d3b33a649e513d7e88904e85
  • 31a2ddaf4b146e021246e1f82e28121f5c9c8729620978309004515c7e559910
  • adaae897fd286aefb64a69e88a53e9af17ee98611ea595c3c92d038f3274d723
  • d8bf48e9ad3de62c695ff34a96e340912bd62e0a0282b94da6386b837c31a30d
Hans Petter Langtangen Updated +Created
It should be mentioned that when you start Googling for PDE stuff, you will reach Han's writings a lot under his GitHub Pages: hplgit.github.io/, and he is one of the main authors of the FEniCS Project.
Unfortunately he died of cancer in 2016, shame, he seemed like a good educator.
He also published to GitHub pages with his own crazy markdown-like multi-output markup language: github.com/hplgit/doconce.
Rest in peace, Hans.
How to develop Ciro Santilli's website before the OurBigBook migration Updated +Created
The website moved from AsciiDoctor to OurBigBook Markup in 2020, making this section mostly useless. But hey, history!
Ciro's website is powered by GitHub Pages and Jekyll Asciidoc.
The source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io
Build locally, watch for changes and rebuild automatically, and start a local server with:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io
cd cirosantilli.github.io
bundle install
npm install
./run
Source: ./run.
The website will be visible at: localhost:4000.
Tested on the latest Ubuntu.
Publish changes to GitHub Pages:
git add -u
git commit -m 'make yourself look sillier'
./publish
Source: ./publish.
GitHub forces us to use the master branch for the build output... so the actual source is in the branch dev.
Update the gems with:
bundle update
git add Gemfile.lock
git commit -m 'update gems'
His website was originally written in markdown, however those were deprecated in favour of AsciiDoctor when Ciro saw the light, rationale shown at: markdown-style-guideuse-asciidoc
List of personal knowledge base software Updated +Created
TODO look into those more:
Major downsides that most of those personal knowledge databases have:
  • very little/no focus on public publishing, which is the primary focus of OurBigBook.com
  • either limited or no multiuser features, e.g. edit protection and cross user topics
  • graph based instead of tree based. For books we need a single clear ordering of a tree. Graph should come as a secondary thing through tags.
Closed source dump:
Markua Updated +Created
In leanpub you write your book in a markdown variant they call Markua, marketed as "markdown for books".
TODO is there a reference implementation that runs locally for HTML output? Or the only reference implementation is closed under leanpub?
Alternatives Updated +Created
These are websites that offer somewhat overlapping services, many of which served inspirations, and why we think something different is needed to achieve our goals.
Notably, OurBigBook is the result of Ciro Santilli's experiences with:
OurBigBook could be seen as a cross between those three websites.
Quick mentions:
Static website-only alternatives:
Conceptual:
Other projects Updated +Created
  • HyperCard: we are kind of a "multiuser" version of HyperCard, trying to tie up cards made by different users. It is worth noting that HyperCard was one of the inspirations for WikiWikiWeb, which then inspired Wikipedia
  • Semantic Web
  • NLab
  • physicstravelguide.com/ Nice manifesto: physicstravelguide.com/about by Jakob Schwichtenberg.
  • OpenStax
  • www.ft.com/content/5515ec3e-0040-4d90-85a9-df19d6e3ebd2 (archive) Twilio’s Jeff Lawson: an evangelist for software developers
    As a student at the University of Michigan, he started a company that made lecture notes available free online, drawing a large audience of Midwestern college students and, soon enough, advertisers. At the height of the dotcom bubble, he dropped out of college, raised $10m from the venture firm Venrock and moved the company to Silicon Valley.
    His start-up drew interest from an acquirer that was planning to go public early in 2000. They closed the acquisition but missed their IPO window as the market plunged, and by August the company had filed for bankruptcy. Stock that Lawson and investors in his start-up received from the sale became worthless.
    You can never be first. But you can have the correct business model. That company's website must have gone into IP Purgatory, and could never be released as an open source website.
    This project won't make a lot of money. Open source and not-for-profit seems like the way to go.
    The website was called stubhub.com/, as of 2021 the domain had been sold to an unrelated website.
    He might actually be interested in donating to OurBigBook.com if it move forward now that he's a billionaire.
  • Knol: basically the exact same thing by Google but 14 years earlier and declared a failure. Quite ominous:
    Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.
  • leanpub: similar goals, markdown-based, but the usual "you own your book copyright and you are trying to sell your book" approach
  • nature Scitable
Quartz (personal knowledge base) Updated +Created
Sponsored by Obsidian itself!
Written in TypeScript!
Markdown support!
Everything is forcibly is scoped to files quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/wikilinks:
[[Path to file#anchor|Anchor]]
Global table of contents based of in-disk file structure: quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/explorer with customizable sorting/filtering.
Softcover (LaTeX) Updated +Created
LaTeX subset that output nicely to HTML.
Too insane though due to LaTeX roots, better just move to newer HTML-first markups like OurBigBook Markup or markdown.
Zim Updated +Created
Local only.
WYSIWYG:
  • bold
  • images
  • lists. But it is either hard or impossible to have a paragraph inside a list item.
Mathematics requires a plugin and a full LaTeX install: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Equation_Editor.html They have a bunch of plugins: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins.html
Can only link to toplevel of each source, not subheaders? And subpages get forced scope. github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki
Publishing to static HTML can be done with:
zim --export Notes -o out
The output does not contain any table of contents? There is a plugin however: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Table_Of_Contents.html
It is unclear if their markup is compatible with an existing language of if it was made up from scratch. Wikipedia says:
In Zim, text is written and saved in a lightweight mark-up that is a hybrid of DokuWiki and Markdown.