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Tag: wordpress

changes (ahead)

Published January 19, 2011 by lieven

In view or recents events & comments, some changes have been made or will be made shortly :

categories : Sanitized the plethora of wordpress-categories to which posts belong. At the moment there are just 5 categories : ‘stories’ and ‘web’ (for all posts with low math-content) and three categories ‘level1’, ‘level2’ and ‘level3’, loosely indicating the math-difficulty of a post.

MathJax : After years of using LatexRender and WP-Latex, we’ll change to MathJax from now on. I’ll try to convert older posts as soon as possible. (Update : did a global search and replace. ‘Most’ LaTeX works, major exceptions being matrices and xymatrix commands. I’ll try to fix those later with LatexRender.)

theme : The next couple of days, the layout of this site may change randomly as I’ll be trying out things with the Swift wordpress theme. Hopefully, this will converge to a new design by next week.

name : Neverendingbooks will be renamed to something more math-related. Clearly, the new name will depend on the topics to be covered. On the main index page a pop-up poll will appear in the lower right-hand corner after 10 seconds. Please fill in the topics you’d like us to cover (no name or email required).

This poll will close on friday 21st at 12 CET and its outcome will influence name/direction of this blog. Use it also if you have a killer newname-suggestion. Among the responses so far, a funnier one : “An intro to, or motivation for non-commutative geometry, aimed at undergraduates. As a rule, I’d take what you think would be just right for undergrads, and then trim it down a little more.”

guest-posts : If you’d like to be a guest-blogger here at irregular times, please contact me. The first guest-post will be on noncommutative topology and the interpretation of quantum physics, and will appear soon. So, stay tuned…

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NeB : 7 years and now an iPad App

Published December 31, 2010 by lieven

Exactly 7 years ago I wrote my first post. This blog wasn’t called NeB yet and it used pMachine, a then free blogging tool (later transformed into expression engine), rather than WordPress.

Over the years NeB survived three hardware-upgrades of ‘the Matrix’ (the webserver hosting it), more themes than I care to remember, and a couple of dramatic closure announcements…

But then we’re still here, soldiering on, still uncertain whether there’s a point to it, but grateful for tiny tokens of appreciation.

Such as this morning’s story: Chandan deemed it necessary to correct two spelling mistakes in a 2 year old Fun-math post on Weil and the Riemann hypothesis (also reposted on Neb here). Often there’s a story behind such sudden comments, and a quick check of MathOverflow revealed this answer and the comments following it.

I thank Ed Dean for linking to the Fun-post, Chandan for correcting the misspellings and Georges for the kind words. I agree with Georges that a cut&copy of a blogpost-quoted text does not require a link to that post (though it is always much appreciated). It is rewarding to see such old posts getting a second chance…

Above the Google Analytics graph of the visitors coming here via a mobile device (at most 5 on a good day…). Anticipating much more iPads around after tonights presents-session I’ve made NeB more accessible for iPods, iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices.

The first time you get here via your Mac-device of choice you’ll be given the option of saving NeB as an App. It has its own icon (lowest row middle, also the favicon of NeB) and flashy start-up screen.

Of course, the whole point trying to make NeB more readable for Mobile users you get an overview of the latest posts together with links to categories and tags and the number of comments. Sliding through you can read the post, optimized for the device.

I do hope you will use the two buttons at the end of each post, the first to share or save it and the second to leave a comment.

I wish you all a lot of mathematical (and other) fun in 2011 :: lieven.

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WikiLeaksโ€™ collateral damage : web-anarchy?

Published December 13, 2010 by lieven

NeB’s web-stats are orders of magnitude out of normal behavior, something must be going on…

  • Spam filter : normally between 10 and 20 spam-comments are trapped. They are removed automatically every 14 days so I only look at them when someone complains a valid comment didn’t get through. This moment, there are 1007 spam-comments held (already 1020 by the time I post this).
  • Akismet-plugin : for those who don’t run a blog, Akismet is an extremely useful WordPress-plugin getting rid of most spam-comments (before entering the spam-filter). I must admit I don’t check Akismet-stats regularly but today the message reads : ‘Akismet has protected your site from 104,145 spam comments already’ (which is about 10% of all visits…).
  • Mail-notifications : this week my email-account is bombarded with spam-comments to approve. Usually there are 1 to 2 such comments a week, now about 20 a day. Part of the problem was that the Akismet-servers were obstructed earlier this week, but the problem persists.
  • Today’s stats show more than 4000 hits, 500 uniques. About 3 times average.

Do we all really need to get caught in the cross-fire between WikiLeaks- and government-hackers?

I have no intention to post my take on WikiLeaks, simply because it won’t be original. As to Assange’s problems with justice : until further evidence comes to light I’m with Naomi Wolf on this (thanks Kea for the link).

If NeB goes off-line for a while, you know why…

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