[IPython-dev] Scipy central & IPython notebook.

[Brian Granger]

A few other reasons I would like this to be developed under the
IPython universe as part of nbviewer:

* I am not sure that the community as a whole is ready to commit to
having the notebook as this central and important.  The ipython dev
team is however ready for this and I think we should just lead with
code and people will follow.
* Marketing.  If it is part of the ipython universe, we can control
the messaging and marketing to promote the notebook and ipython.  As a
project, we tend to not be very outgoing with our marketing and I
think this is a mistake.  This type of site is a great opportunity for
us to be bold with our messaging = "The IPython Notebook is awesome
and you should be using it for stuff like this, here is how to get
started!"
*  I want us to be able to develop the site it in a way that has a
consistent look and feel as i) the notebook web app and ii) the
ipython website.  If we develop it ourselves, that is not a problem.
If we work with the larger community, there are other stake holders.
I think that in the long run, we will want to have consistently
branded sites (using something like twitter bootstrap with a
consistent theme).
* Any such site has to be developed in close conjunction with the
direction of the notebook file format and nbconvert.  The ipython dev
team are the primary stakeholders in that.

Cheers,

Brian


On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Brian Granger <ellisonbg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thomas,
>
> Originally I was thinking exactly the same that that you are
> proposing.  But once I saw nbviewer, my thinking changed:
>
> * It makes no sense to reinvent a website for actually hosting
> notebooks - github and friends work perfectly.  There are multiple
> problems with having separate uploads onto the website:  i) the author
> of the notebook has to maintain that content separately from their
> original source, which is probably on github anyways ii) the uploaded
> notebook won't be version controlled, so if we want to allow
> versioning, we have to reinvent it, iii) when someone wants to use and
> modify the notebook, they can't just fork/clone it.  In summary, we
> should strongly encourage any such solution to simply use github for
> hosted content.  This is part of why I so strongly support the vision
> of nbvewier.
> * What nbviewer should gain is the ability for users to register their
> github (or elsewhere) hosted notebooks so there is a central list of
> notebooks that everyone can view.  It would be nice if there could be
> comments, tags, and link to different formats of the notebook.
> * Given these features, what we are really talking about here is
> nbviewer, not scipy-central and I think it should be developed under
> that name within the IPython universe.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Brian
>
> On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
>> An idea I've had knocking around for a while is to integrate the
>> IPython notebook format, and the nbconvert code, with scipy-central.
>> As I envisage it, users could upload a notebook, and the server would
>> automatically generate static HTML and .py formats from it. Visitors
>> would see the HTML view with links to download as .ipynb or .py. One
>> of the first examples I clicked on [1] includes code, descriptive
>> text, equations, and a plot - pretty much a text book example of what
>> the notebook does well.
>>
>> I've included here Kevin Dunn, the owner of the scipy-central codebase
>> on Github. Kevin, does this idea sound interesting? I appreciate that
>> you might not have the time to work on it (it looks like the
>> scipy-central repository is a bit dead), but if someone were keen to
>> tackle it, would you have time to guide them around the architecture
>> of scipy-central, and would you be willing to merge and deploy that
>> feature when it was complete?
>>
>> [1] http://scipy-central.org/item/12/3/integrating-an-initial-value-problem-single-ode
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Thomas
>> _______________________________________________
>> IPython-dev mailing list
>> IPython-dev at scipy.org
>> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/ipython-dev
>
>
>
> --
> Brian E. Granger
> Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
> bgranger at calpoly.edu and ellisonbg at gmail.com



-- 
Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgranger at calpoly.edu and ellisonbg at gmail.com