Scirate Rewrite

[Bill Rosgen]

I've more or less rewritten Scirate in Ruby on Rails. This site is currently approximately as functional as I remember the old scirate being, but it's possible that I've forgotten everyone's favourite feature. Also: please don't share this information very widely, as I have yet to hear back from Dave, and I'm not trying to steal his website.

The source code is at https://github.com/rosgen/scirate3 and the site is currently deployed at https://vivid-fog-5450.herokuapp.com/ .

If you create an account you can scite papers. If you want more than quant-ph you can 'subscribe' to multiple arXiv feeds, the result of which should be that the homepage lists all of today's papers from all of your feeds.

This should be considered some sort of beta. I will do my best to keep all of the data, but if the goal is to take scirate in new directions that may not be possible.

There are couple of caveats to my implementation:

1) All the emails (password change tokens and signup verification tokens) are currently going out from my personal gmail account. This is because it's easy to set up that way and I don't have another SMTP server handy.

2) Some of the old features are missing: there is no search, there is no admin interface to deal with spam, etc. There is also no way for a user to delete their account -- if you want to do such a thing the current interface is to send me an email.

3) The code is probably pretty ugly: I didn't know Ruby or Rails before I started.

4) The database of papers only goes back so far. There's about a month of data for quant-ph, but only a couple of days for most of the arxiv categories.

5) I'm not a very good web designer. Suggestions for how things should look are welcome.

Bill

[mick]

Hi Bill,

Looks good! Thanks for putting in the time to re-write the site. Aside
from the early logon glitch it seems to be working pretty well.

One request for a feature: could you add the ability to change the
"view" from 1 day to a week or to some specified number of days. As
far as I can tell you can only view 1 day at a time in your
implementation.

I found this feature very useful in the original scirate, if I missed
the arxiv for a day or two it made it much easier to catch up on what
has been going on.

The site looks nice and simple with no clutter. I forgot how appealing
that feature of scirate was, definitely been missing it while using
other things (like google+). I'm beginning to form the opinion that it
might be a good thing to have no comment fields on such sites as they
seem to inevitably require some sort of moderation which always leads
to problems.

Thanks again for your work.

mick.

On Apr 24, 11:39 am, Bill Rosgen <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've more or less rewritten Scirate in Ruby on Rails.  This site is currently approximately as functional as I remember the old scirate being, but it's possible that I've forgotten everyone's favourite feature.  Also: please don't share this information very widely, as I have yet to hear back from Dave, and I'm not trying to steal his website.
>

> The source code is athttps://github.com/rosgen/scirate3and the site is currently deployed athttps://vivid-fog-5450.herokuapp.com/.

[Bill Rosgen]

On 2012-04-27, at 15:27 , mick wrote:

> One request for a feature: could you add the ability to change the
> "view" from 1 day to a week or to some specified number of days. As
> far as I can tell you can only view 1 day at a time in your
> implementation.
>
> I found this feature very useful in the original scirate, if I missed
> the arxiv for a day or two it made it much easier to catch up on what
> has been going on.

I've added such a feature to the main page. There are now links to display a wider range of dates beneath the next day and previous day links. I'm not really happy with the interface, so it may change if I can figure out something better.

The current list of options is 2, 3, 4, or 7 days, but all these links do is add parameters to the URL. All of the parameters exposed in the URL are user-editable, so that you can ask for as many days as you like (in the 'range' parameter). This is the part of the interface that I'm least happy with: I don't expect users to realize that they can adjust these parameters. Ideally there would be a slick javascript popup with a field for the number of days, but I don't (currently) know how to code such a thing.

Bill

[aram harrow]

Hi Bill,
I think your site is awesome! Simple, but does the job.

We should see if Dave is ok with giving it the scirate.com domain
name. Otherwise, perhaps it's worth going with a different one (not
that vivid-fog-5450... isn't also good...)

One thing that Steve and I can do while at UW is hire an undergrad to
work on this over the summer. Is that something you'd be interested
in?
Apart from basic interface design, we thought it would be useful to
support groups, such as local journal clubs that use scirate to manage
their paper lists, or even overlay journals that referee papers that
are primarily hosted on arxiv.org. I'm sure you can come up with more
ideas too.
What do you think? I don't know how much time you want to spend on it
vs. how much ownership you want to have over it, and we certainly
don't want to step on your toes, but I think having someone dedicated
try to push this forward could be really positive.

-aram

[aram harrow]

Hi Bill et al,
Something along the model of what I was talking about it here:
http://yann.lecun.com/ex/pamphlets/publishing-models.html

Obviously it'd be a lot of work, and is not a necessary piece of
scirate. But I think it would naturally fit on top of that software
platform.

-aram

[Bill Rosgen]

On 2012-05-09, at 13:33 , aram harrow wrote:
> We should see if Dave is ok with giving it the scirate.com domain
> name. Otherwise, perhaps it's worth going with a different one (not

> that vivid-fog-5450... isn't also good…)

I am all in favour of moving either the domain or the site to Dave's host at scirate.com. The site is currently at Heroku because it's very easy -- so easy that I wouldn't mind it staying there. The other option is to move the site to where scirate.com is currently hosted, but this implies doing some work, as the authentication system I'm using is a feature of Rails 3.1 which isn't supported, yadda yadda technobabble, etc.

I'll be away (TQC) from the middle of next week though about the end of May, so this may have to wait until then.

> One thing that Steve and I can do while at UW is hire an undergrad to
> work on this over the summer. Is that something you'd be interested
> in?

I would be interested in such a thing, if funds are available and there is a useful direction to head in.

> Apart from basic interface design, we thought it would be useful to
> support groups, such as local journal clubs that use scirate to manage
> their paper lists, or even overlay journals that referee papers that
> are primarily hosted on arxiv.org. I'm sure you can come up with more
> ideas too.

These are good ideas. It's not immediately clear to me how to implement a journal club on top of scirate, but it's certainly worth thinking about.

> What do you think? I don't know how much time you want to spend on it
> vs. how much ownership you want to have over it, and we certainly
> don't want to step on your toes, but I think having someone dedicated
> try to push this forward could be really positive.

Please step on my toes! The source code is public so that people can do whatever they like with it. I can certainly help out / continue to develop, but I am not full of great ideas. My two goals were to learn Ruby on Rails and to bring back Scirate, so I would be happy to give up some 'ownership' if that meant that there would be other people who were pushing things forward. Please don't step on Dave's toes though, Scirate is his website, I just reimplemented it.

Bill

[Aram Harrow]

> I am all in favour of moving either the domain or the site to Dave's host at scirate.com. The site is currently at Heroku because it's very easy -- so easy that I wouldn't mind it staying there. The other option is to move the site to where scirate.com is currently hosted, but this implies doing some work, as the authentication system I'm using is a feature of Rails 3.1 which isn't supported, yadda yadda technobabble, etc.
>
> I'll be away (TQC) from the middle of next week though about the end of May, so this may have to wait until then.

We could perhaps redirect scirate.com to point to the Heroku site. Or
we could try to get a different easy-to-remember URL as well. Perhaps
the owners of arxiv.info and arxiv.net could be convinced to give up one
of those.

> I would be interested in such a thing, if funds are available and
> there is a useful direction to head in.

Great! I'll go ahead and advertise. And yes, I have NSF grants that
can pay for this.

> These are good ideas. It's not immediately clear to me how to
> implement a journal club on top of scirate, but it's certainly worth
> thinking about.

UNM uses a primitive home-made journal-club web site where people can
submit papers they want to briefly talk about: basically it's a form
that accepts a URL and some comments, which are then projected onto a
screen and discussed during the meeting.
This seems similar to scirate comments; the difference is that, like
with facebook or google+, you can designate some comments to be
world-readable, and some to be shared only with a specific group.

> Please step on my toes! The source code is public so that people can
> do whatever they like with it. I can certainly help out / continue to
> develop, but I am not full of great ideas. My two goals were to learn
> Ruby on Rails and to bring back Scirate, so I would be happy to give
> up some 'ownership' if that meant that there would be other people who
> were pushing things forward. Please don't step on Dave's toes though,
> Scirate is his website, I just reimplemented it. Bill

Ok, great. I think Dave doesn't mind other people going forward with
this, but Dave, please correct me if I'm wrong, or if you'd prefer we
use a different name or something.

-aram