Matt Leifer

Bookmarked so I can go back and add some to my feeds later. - Matt Leifer

Summary of a couple of papers on giving effective public lectures and using them in the classroom. - Matt Leifer

"Regarding automatic population of metadata, have you tried a services like Papers, Mendeley or CiteULike, all of which can populate a record from the DOI or other identifiers, e.g. arXiv identifier. They are not perfect and require a little manual editing, but both can output bibtex files." - Matt Leifer

"There are quite a few wiki engines out there that are backed by a distributed version control system. This means you can easily edit them online using the browser, but also checkout the repository and work with the files in a local text editor. I am working on getting one of these wikis LaTeX and MathML enabled as a possible solution for collaborative paper authoring. I can't solve the hosting problem, but I intend to make the installation as painless as possible, including on cheapo shared hosting accounts.Adapting this to a provide a simple engine should also not be too difficult, although it would not have all the features of Wordpress." - Matt Leifer

"I don't think so. If you use a DVCS backend then you could ditch the database completely and just store all the content in flat-files. The DVCS would make sure that the history would be stored efficiently and interacting with a DVCS is similar to dealing with an abstraction-layer.Anyway, I hope to come up with a proof of concept of this within a few months." - Matt Leifer

"Hmm, I've had a few email exchanges with Andrew about these issues and the basic difference is that he doesn't seem to buy into the whole web2.0, cloud computing fandango as much as I do. In my view, the distinction between "writing for the web" and "writing for print" is a big red herring. The web is a big place and there is room for putting a variety of content types on it, both long and short form. Also, I think that the distinction between "writing for the web" and "writing for print" will disappear in the near future, particularly as ebook readers get more sophisticated and widely adopted. Turning blogs into books is already quite common, which is something that I should not need to mention on this particular blog. I agree that distributed version control systems are a great solution, but they are not for the faint of heart. A good collaborative tool should offer straightforward web interfaces for the average user, whilst allowing technically inclined users to leverage the full..." - Matt Leifer

"Gellmu is really very nice, but it is a bit off-putting for people who are just looking for something to plug into their web-app. For example, I wish someone would come up with an implementation in a language that is commonly used for web programming, i.e. not Emacs Lisp, and I wish someone would write some documentation designed for end users that doesn't assume a lot of knowledge about SGML and LaTeX (or at least doesn't assume that the reader wants to wade through a lot of technical discussion about the SGML philosophy of Gellmu)." - Matt Leifer