Incoming links: Markdown
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)
- 4c903a377addab7c1e35a685d3dabc664199e406374b1e5ce2fc59e78fb5b754: 1MVpQJA7FtcDrwKC6zATkZvZcxqma4JixS
- 87aad85c6cd75a516789f364637d243c668e3424d031ae510e43c6edfe6ed206: 1MVpQJA7FtcDrwKC6zATkZvZcxqma4JixS
- c206e8fff656f07b27dac831ef9b956792bae4e76a2cb43f14f49f0298bf2c2f: 1MVpQJA7FtcDrwKC6zATkZvZcxqma4JixS
- ca4f11131eca6b4d61daf707a470cfccd1ef3d80a6f8b70f1f07616b451ca64e: 1MVpQJA7FtcDrwKC6zATkZvZcxqma4JixS
Other related transactions:
- tx 87aad85c6cd75a516789f364637d243c668e3424d031ae510e43c6edfe6ed206, block 474652 (2017-07-07) via cryptograffiti.info the default pandoc markdown pandoc.org/try markdown tutorial string! First, unseen in our ASCII dumps due to UTF-8 encoding::followed by:
Unicode test: `Ä Ö Õ Ü ä ö õ ü`.And if ends with:An h1 header ============ Paragraphs are separated by a blank line.Uploaded from http://cryptograffiti.info to demonstrate Markdown rendering.
TODO understand what these are:
- ae92dc4c31943955ad6e3e45a4eb0067f488fdd9aecca65c946460dd2a85488d
- 3020dbd7c850bf8c19ebacf670a2830fe50999a8b2560a202af21d536760eea4
- d65384a21cb1c327cc42416a0b1e2a78ad0296cb7a15312bdcd67ef169ecb309
- a3e3100d2b9a86e310430945c001df97a70626220a9e151208aecbb613f1f152
- a9c82ebc47fabd1eed7eeea7760d0a3c99288af3c3a17e396ec790fc280698a2
- 92bfd5c0fb0f24efa6ca568c4475f44e94dfc8d0d4d5da04dfafc6261bf17f45
- 73c22adb21b93f9220d00d2614a50350824be95b8ea966349e6f35fe5ac5537b
- 099c0fd06d18953c886121ff143ea0a20d0baf29999f424fa1ac707a81cf4987
- 3ad6677303fb6f700a4f2f977fe86e5324e0ddb0d3b33a649e513d7e88904e85
- 31a2ddaf4b146e021246e1f82e28121f5c9c8729620978309004515c7e559910
- adaae897fd286aefb64a69e88a53e9af17ee98611ea595c3c92d038f3274d723
- d8bf48e9ad3de62c695ff34a96e340912bd62e0a0282b94da6386b837c31a30d
GitHub account: github.com/hplgit
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 2025-03-25 +Created 1970-01-01
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
./runSource:
./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'
./publishSource:
./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
GitHub pages is chosen instead of a single page GitHub README.adoc for the following reasons:
- Ciro will want some unsupported extensions, notably mathematics, likely with KaTeX server side:
- github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/pull/3338
- stackoverflow.com/questions/11256433/how-to-show-math-equations-in-general-githubs-markdownnot-githubs-blog
- g14n.info/2014/09/math-on-github-pages/
- stackoverflow.com/questions/11256433/how-to-show-math-equations-in-general-githubs-markdownnot-githubs-blog
- www.quora.com/How-can-I-combine-latex-and-markdown-in-GitHub
- when GitHub dies, Ciro's website URL still lives and retains the PageRank!
Lists:
- www.bibsonomy.org/user/bshanks/education fantastic list, presumably by this guy:
- www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/168cmca/which_note_taking_app_for_a_luhmann_zettlekasten/
- www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/18vvavl/best_free_notetaking_app_switching_from_evernote/
- github.com/topics/note-taking has a billion projects. Oops.
- www.noteapps.ca/
Personal knowledge base recommendation threads:
TODO look into those more:
- roamresearch.com/ no public graphs
- nesslabs.com/roam-research-alternatives a bunch of open source alternatives to it
- Trillium Notes. Notable project! Pun unintended!
- Stroll giffmex.org/stroll/stroll.html. How to publish? How to see tree?
- tiddlyroam joekroese.github.io/tiddlyroam/ graph rather than text searchable ToC. Public instance? Multiuser?
- Athens github.com/athensresearch/athens rudimentary WYSIWYG
- Logseq github.com/logseq/logseq no web interface/centralized server?
- itsfoss.com/obsidian-markdown-editor. Closed source. They have an OK static website publication mechanism: publish.obsidian.md/ram-rachum-research/Public/Agents+aren't+objective+entities%2C+they're+a+model but leaf node view only for now, no cross source page render. They are committed to having plaintext source which is cool: twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792
- But no upvotes/topics. Favorites could be used as upvotes, but it does not seem like you can favorite other people's work. It's just not their focus, will never be.They have an education push: www.notion.so/product/notion-for-education but it's likely hopeless.
- CherryTree github.com/giuspen/cherrytree written in C++, GTK, WYSIWYG
- github.com/dullage/flatnotes: Python
- github.com/usememos/memos: Go
- github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan: Go
- github.com/vnotex/vnote: C++
- github.com/Laverna/laverna: JavaScript
- github.com/taniarascia/takenote
- github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet: TypeScript, Markdown, web-based WYSIWYG, focus on querying
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:
- www.toodledo.com
- Simplenote: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplenote, by WordPress.com operator company Automattic
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?
Spec: markua.com/
Good:
- WYSIWYG
- Extended-Markdown-based
- help.obsidian.md/Getting+started/Sync+your+notes+across+devices they do have a device sync mechanism
- it watches the filesystem and if you change anything it gets automatically updated on UI
- help.obsidian.md/links#Link+to+a+block+in+a+note you can set (forcibly scoped) IDs to blocks. But it's not exposed on WYSIWYG?
Bad:
- forced ID scoping on the tree as usual
- no browser-only editor, it's just a local app apparently:
- obsidian.md/publish they have a publish function, but you can't see the generated websites with JavaScript turned off. And they charge you 8 dollars / month for that shit. Lol.
- folders are not articles, you can't see them as as page
- HTML export only as third party plugin:Possibly in self conflict with them wanting people to pay 8 dollars / month for their hosting? Crazy.
- block elements like images and tables cannot have captions?
- they kind of have synonyms: help.obsidian.md/aliases but does it work on source code?
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.
- Wikipedia
- GitHub
- Stack Exchange (or as non techies might point out, Urban Dictionary, or Quora before it was such an incomprehensible shitshow)
Quick mentions:
- handwiki.org/wiki/HandWiki:About: technically the same as Wikipedia, but with more aligned moderation policies
- ecotext.co/ similar goals. Their website seems quite broken now though as of 2021, can't see text properly. Crunchbase entry: www.crunchbase.com/organization/ecotext says they are from Durham, New Hampshire, United States. Cannot see how to publish, curated material only? Twitter: twitter.com/ecotextinc?lang=en One of the founders: twitter.com/BigNel_21 | www.linkedin.com/in/ecotextnelsonthomas/. Their LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ecotext/people/
- fiveable.me/ bad: separates students and teachers, as a student I don't see where to create my content. Good: focus on teaching university level stuff to people outside of university via Advanced Placement. Bad: Lots of video content. Bad: Can't see the issue tracker attached to each page.
- LessWrong: their website system does have some similar feature sets to what we want. Reputation, Q&A sections, links between articles most likely, sort by upvote everywhere.
- crowdpub.org collaborative writing website, somehow goes to paragraph level, TODO how they reconcile different authors? Closed beta as of writing, so hard to be sure. From quick presentation on beta website, appears to attempt to share revenue to authors proportionally to the size of their contribution. Some blockchain-based reputation. Meh.
- TODO migrate all from: github.com/booktree/booktree/blob/master/alternatives.md
- studynotes.ie/. Admin approval on everything. No ToC. Fixed tag list for university entry exams topics.
- mindstone.com: there appears to be no sharing focus? File upload basesd? Not sure.
- EverybodyWiki
- looking for open source Confluence-alternatives is an interesting way to go:
- lists:
- BookStack:
- fixed 3-level page hierarchy
- writen in PHP
- Markdown support: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/markdown-editor/
- no source-level import-export apparently: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/backup-restore/, youtu.be/WUvtzJfCAKE?t=904
- WYSIWYG: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/wysiwyg-editor/ via TinyMCE
- page content repeating: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/reusing-page-content/ (will be useful for course modelling)
- github.com/shuding/nextra converts Markdown links to Next.js links. We should look into how it works.
- zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ "The Archive" from zettelkasten.de/. Closed source. By German software engineer Christian Tietze twitter.com/ctietze?lang=en
- LLM generated wiki e.g.:
- docs.tigyog.app/cli beautiful website, but doesn't achieve much. Has a Markdown upload mechanism. Ah, those newbs who think the average user will care about markup upload to DB... Oh, wait...
- www.stuvia.com/en-gb/school/uk/oxford-university/physics. PDF uploads. In theory you have to own copyright: www.stuvia.com/en-gb/copyright/guidelines but it feels unlikely that most material was uploaded by the copyright owners. If those people are up, then why can't we? Maybe... Registred in the UK. People: some Dutch dudes:
- Project Xanadu: crazy overlaps, though that project is vaporware apparently?
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
Static website-only alternatives:
- quarto.org/
- vitepress.dev. vitepress.dev/guide/markdown unmanaged internal links. Sample website: wiki.nikiv.dev/.
Conceptual:
- The Final Encyclopedia: science fiction concept, but the name was reused by Paul Allen in a research project
- second brain
- collective intelligence
- 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 developersYou 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.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.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
OK, just going random now:
Docs: quartz.jzhao.xyz/
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.
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.
Long story short, the project is so far a complete failure on the most important metric: number of regular users, which current sits at exactly one: myself.
There were notable users who found the project online and who actually tried to use the website for some content and provided extremely valuable feedback:Unfortunately after the period of a few weeks they stopped using it to follow their other priorities instead. Which is of course totally fine, however sad.
I still believe that the OurBigBook Web feature is a significant tech innovation that could make the website go big.
I also believe that the project gets many fundamentals of braindumping right, notably the infinitely deep table of contents without forced scoping, e.g.:does not make Calculus have an ID orr URL of
- Mathematics
- Calculusmathematics/calculus, rather it's just calculus.
Internal cross file internal link uses only the leaf ID
hilbert-space.But there is a fundamental difficulty in reaching critical mass to that self-sustaining point, as people don't seem to be convinced by these logical "my system is better" argument alone, as opposed to having them Google into stuff they need now and then understand that the project is awesome.
A closely related critical mass issue is that existing big multiuser knowledge base websites such as Stack Overflow and Wikipedia have a tremendous advantage on PageRank. No matter how useless a Wikipedia article about something is, it will always be on top of Google within a week of creation for title hits. And since the main goal of publishing your stuff is to get it seen, it makes much more sense for writers to publish on such existing websites whenever possible, because anywhere else it is way way less likely to be seen by anybody.
Even I end up writing way more on Stack Overflow than on OurBigBook as a programmer. But I still believe that there is a value to OurBigBook, for the usual reasons of:
- it allows you to organize a more global view of a subject, i.e. a book. Even I write answers on Stack Overflow, I also tend to organize links to these answers in a structured ways here, see e.g. big topics such as SQL
- deletionism and overly narrowness of allowed topics/style
Perhaps what saddens me the most is that even on GitHub stars/Twitter/Hacker news terms there is almost no interest in the project despite the fact that I consider that it has innovations, while many other note taking apps as well in the thousands of stars. Maybe I'm just delusional and all the tech that I'm doing is completely useless?
Part of the issue is probably linked to the fact that most other note taking apps focus on "help me organize my ideas so I can make more money" and often completely ignore "I want to publish my knowledge", and stuff that helps you make money is always easier to sell and promote.
OurBigBook on the other hand a huge focus on "I want to publish me knowledge". It aims almost single mindedly in being the best tool ever for that. However this doesn't make money for people, and therefore there are going to be way less potential users.
I do believe strongly that all it takes is a few users for the project to snowball. For some people, once you start braindumping, it is very addictive, and you never want to stop basically. So with only a few of those we can open large parts of undergrad knowledge to the world. But these people are few, and so far I haven't been able to find even a single one like me, and on top of that convince them that I have created the ultimate system for their knowledge publishing desires.
Another general lesson is that I should perhaps aimed for greater compatibility with existing systems such as Obsidian. Taking something that many people already know and use can have a huge impact on acceptance. E.g. anything that touches Obsidian can reach thousands of stars: github.com/KosmosisDire/obsidian-webpage-export. Note taking apps that aim for "markdown" compatibility also tend to fare better, even if in the end you inevitably have to extend the Markdown for some of your features. And WYSIWYG, which I want but don't have, is perhaps the ultimate familiarity.
Another issue compared to other platforms is that OurBigBook just came out late. Obsidian launched in 2020. Roam Research and Trillium Notes also came earlier. And it is hard to fight the advantage already gained by those on the "I'm going to take some personal notes" area. I do believe however that there a strong separation between "these are my personal notes" and "I want to publish these". Once you decide to publish your knowledge, you immediately start to write in a different way, and it is very hard to convert pre-existing "private" notes into ones suitable for public consumption.
Zim zim-wiki.org/
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:The output does not contain any table of contents? There is a plugin however: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Table_Of_Contents.html
zim --export Notes -o outIt is unclear if their markup is compatible with an existing language of if it was made up from scratch. Wikipedia says:
You can't determine the ordering or pages at the same level, alphabetical ordering of force. The poplevel is encoded in Feature request: github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/issues/32. It's not usable as a publishing system!
notebook.zim:[Notebook]
home=HomeDoesn't seem to have image captions: superuser.com/questions/1285898/picture-description-in-zim-wiki-0-64