Essentially, you just need to add the following code in the header of your web site (where “path.to” should be replaced with the URL to your installation of jsMath):

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://path.to/jsMath/easy/load.js"></script>

For this web site, the above line was added to the headers of each of the template files of the component software packages.

One minor trick to getting jsMath to work with Wikindx is that all special characters have to be escaped properly\(\). For example, to get the title of Mario Szegedy’s paper^[1] on quantum walks to display correctly, as seen here, I had to enter the title as:

Spectra of Quantized Walks and a \$\sqrt{{}\delta\epsilon{}}\$-Rule

That is, where the LaTeX math syntax requires a left curly bracket, you enter “{{}”, and where it requires a right curly bracket, you enter “{}}”. The title then appears as in the footnote below.

I have created a setup help page on the wiki to record details such as these. Also, see this forum post for some macros defined for use on this site.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Wikindx macro plug-in for WordPress
2. Using the Ajaxified Expand Post Now plug-in with Rob Miller’s Footnotes plug-in
3. Annotate With Jarnal Plug-In Module for Wikindx

To begin with, I didn’t find any ready-made projects which exactly suited my needs. The most impressive, and the one which came the closest to what I was looking for, is OpenWetWare, but its focus is on biology and biological engineering. Chemists have also gotten into the act with UsefulChem, which is hosted on wikispaces.

I did not locate any project of a similar scope or scale for physics or, perhaps ironically, computer science. The physics community is actually an early adopter of electronic scientific publishing, with its embrace of the arXiv since 1991. And the quantum community has not just one but two — count ‘em, two — whole wikis to itself: Quantiki and Qwiki. Michael Nielsen (the Mike of Mike and Ike, which is widely considered the standard text for quantum computation) has written an extensive post about the opening up of scientific culture.

Another reason for building the site myself, instead of relying on a ready-made solution, is the degree of control I would have over its customization. For a biologist or chemist, communications technologies such as blogs and wikis are only tools. But for a computer scientist, these technologies are themselves objects of study.

Following OpenWetWare’s example, I have installed MediaWiki (for wikis) and WordPress (for blogs), and I have also added bbPress (for bulletin boards) and WIKINDX (for bibliography management) into the mix.

Despite the fact that the name ★grads.net, which came to me in a fit of inspiration, suggests multiple grad(uate student)s, for now this experiment in open notebook science is mine alone.

– davinci

No related posts.