Threads
I just thought of a cool MT plugin idea: a plugin that generates a graph of blogging activity. Simple, yet useful. It could be used to determine the average lifetime of (MT) blogs; I suspect it would also motivate lazy people like myself to blog more often. Really, I am suprised I’ve heard nothing about such a plugin.. I’m almost tempted to attempt writing it myself. And perhaps I will.
But first, I had yet another brilliant idea. A database of proofs– the perfect site for any math freak like myself– community generated and editorialized. Because sometimes you would rather find a proof written up on the web than have to fuss around with chat rooms or rely on the untimely altruism of newsgroupers. I figure I could run a latex-html translation backend so equations and what not could be translated to gifs and embedded in the pages; also, some subset of latex text formatting (e.g.: bold, emphasis) could be supported. And if the site took off, we could have special interest bulletin boards, and an area to allow people to request certain proofs be added to the database, and even specialized ‘tutorials’ that give condensed tutorials in a mathematical field by stringing together a series of proofs from the database along with remarks. I do mean database, as everything should be indexed under several fields (e.g.: complexity (a good metric would be undergrad w/ year in curriculumn, grad, or postgrad), cool factor (subjective of course, but possibly useful), technique (contradiction, exhaustion, etc.), mathematical classification (I would have to look it up, but I know there is a system), year originally published (if applicable), poster, date posted). Duh! I forgot to mention, not only would this database support proofs, it would also support definitions. And everything in the database would have to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License.
I have a dream!
Possibly relevant posts:
- LaTeX blogs– sounds sexy! (8/3/2001)
- Meta Category setup (1/23/2005)
- NRC Rankings (12/25/2004)