Recently I've finished the website called Choose Your Textbook. This is a Scientific Literature Browser. One can browse there through the tree of science (the branches are taken from the wiki), and see the short description of those sciences. To the right there is an Amazon search box, where the name of the currently chosen branch is dynamically loaded, thus it shows the (most) relevant books at Amazon for a specific discipline.

Technically speaking, this is a mashup, but part of mashing is done offline. It's with my tools written in Scheme, and it is possible to do that dynamically, as there exist Scheme-s embedded to JS. But not for this project. The tooling converts that specific wiki-page in a chain HTML -> SXML -> (filtering) -> JSON. The latter is embedded to the website's JS. A nice tree / graph renderer called JIT is used to show the tree. JIT does animation / morphing and supports a few layouts. Seems, though, it cannot switch between them dynamically. I've stumbled at some other restrictions also, e.g. couldn't setup decent automatic node sizes.

Despite I've designed the website as an Amazon affiliate, I knew there wouldn't be much popularity. I tried to put a link to Hacker News and to Reddit, but both unsuccessful. So, there are almost no visitors at all. Nevertheless, my point was to try a few things: make my first mashup, write some tooling in Scheme, including DOM-manipulation, try out some web graph renderer, and last but not least, I wanted to skim through the tree of Science looking with one eye on existing appropriate literature list. And those goals are accomplished.

Some months ago my notebook began to overheat. When the CPU is loaded enough, its temperature grows over 95 degrees Celsius, and a guard mechanism throttles down its frequency to 40 % and waits until it cools down. Within a few minutes the system is badly responsive.

I bought a cooling platform for it, but with time it couldn't restrain the heat. A problem became worse and worse, but the warranty for the laptop was void already. So, I took a screwdriver and solved it:

A dense layer of dust covered the radiator and prevented air flow. Now under 100 % load my CPU is cool enough. I mean, for a Turion --- 80 degrees Celsius for the general sensor, 85 for the first core, and 91-93 for the second one (sitting on a table, without a cooling platform). Strange gradient, but anyway, a system doesn't freeze now.

I tried wpmathpub plugin, but it didn't work for me. Now thanks to Craig Rose I have a better plugin for math notation. It uses an external service (usually WordPress server) for turning LaTeX-notation into pics, and thus capable of much more than wpmathpub plugin (that uses the PhpMathPublisher library and implements just a small subset of TeX-formulae).

I found the Source Code syntax highlighting plugin for WordPress, which makes use of GeSHi highliter and installed it. Now to get proper colorizing (the default code-tag of WordPress looks pale) for Scheme code I embed it into <pre lang="scheme">...<pre> tags.

Actually, I dont like default colors and already created dups of templates for Scheme R6RS and Nemerle. But will elaborate those later.

There is also JavaScript-based highligher named SHJS, which can simulate different IDEs, i.e. has many templates for each language, but the list of supported languages looks somewhat narrower and doesn't contain Lisp / Scheme. Which is not a problem of course, but anyway, I don't want client-side colorizing.

Now you can see tags nearby postings. This is simply by adding the clause

<?php the_tags('<strong>Tags:</strong> ', ' | ', ''); ?>

to the <div class="date_author_comments"> in files single.php, index.php, search.php and archive.php of the WhitePress theme (version 1.1.7).

Overlooked the manual for backing up. It seems, the easiest way of backing up a WordPress database, listed here is to use the appropriate plugin. Installation didn't bring troubles. Backed up the DB also smoothly, however, had to choose "save to server" option, cause "download to my computer" didn't work (in Opera browser). There are just 10 tables in WordPress engine. Upgraded the engine using the manual without a problem as well.

Just switched to a new WordPress theme (skin). Despite minimalistic, had to threw out several things from a sidebar.

I didn't like the default behaviour of the engine, when it's printing shortened versions of postings at the home page. Moreover, dereferencing links on that page is an awful feature. So, I've run into the engine and changed the_excerpt() function to the_content() one in files index.php, archive.php and search.php. Now it's ok. The following WordPress help topics were useful: The Loop, Changing Read More tag behaviour, however, I've not read them, just looked through.

Later on I'll backup and upgrade the engine to a new version. It'd nice to find proper colorizer for code-tag, preferably for Scheme and C# (the latest I'll update to handle Nemerle-code). I have also to look how to print tags (not html ones) near a posting. And does the latest engine's version support OpenID?