Good search functionality should include a way to search for all MR items with numbers from 500000 to 500999, and see which ones are missing. This could be used for people to add missing items, although we need not advertise this.
Can one get grants for this kind of project from somewhere?
How to avoid spam?
It seems crucial that the site is really good before it goes public. How achieve this?
Add somewhere on a site a list/warning for possible duplicates, and find a way of dealing with the merging (and sometimes maybe un-merging) of items. This seems difficult because it requires the attention of someone who knows the article(s) well.
Do we need an optional OpenID login for use of the local copy?
Advertise the site as follows: Database of the mathematical literature, complementing MR and ZBL in the following ways: More links to online material. Open for discussions, questions, comments, links to related material and related articles. All contributions are welcome if they can help someone else understand the item better. Explain the belief that there is a trend towards complete accessibility to all literature (for example, the recent open access developments with a note on various types of open access, digitizing projects, the moving walls of for example NUMDAM, and so on. Mention that even the major publishers usually allow authors to post a copy on their own webpage.)
Andrew email: Slightly more seriously, we wanted a rails specialist since Instiki is a rails app, so I hunted round the forums and so forth until I found one that didn’t seem to have too many complaints about it, and which had reasonable uptimes (there was some site that measured this, but I forget where now - I can look it up later).
We’re on a 1Gb VPS costing about 100UKP per quarter. We pay in dollars, though, and share the cost round a bit. That’s plenty space for us, but we wanted room to manoeuvre. There are a few cheaper, but for VPS then there’s not a lot below. The lowest level for RP is a 256Mb server at $20 per month (unless you pay annually). That’s about the lowest price that I found. For comparison, uk2.net has VPS starting at 15UKP (or did last time I looked).
I am looking for aserver solution for my own personal note-taking system, which I guess works in a way similar to people’s private pages on nLab, but is tailor-made for my needs. If you have any ideas on good solutions I would be very happy. Requirements include PHP with certain extensions (multibyte strings, pdo-sqlite) and blahtex. Also, since I’m still a graduate student I cannot afford to pay very much, although I would be willing to pay a very small amount if the service was very good. I would also like to have good enough bandwidth, as I might make most of it public some time in the future, as an experiment.
If you’re on a VPS then you can install what you like. If you just want hosting then you have constraints on what’s offered. We originally tried a hosting scheme with uk2.net. It didn’t work, mainly because it seemed as though they’d never had anyone try a rails app before so every time I wanted to do something, the admin guys had to install it afresh. Quite annoying! But I think they’d be more stable with PHP stuff. You can generally ask about specific requirements before you sign up, though just because they say that they have it doesn’t mean that they have it correctly installed! But uk2.net were fairly decent and I managed to get my money back without any hassle so I’m happy recommending that you at least take a look at them.
Currently it is hosted on a very temporary server at a friend’s house, on the following address: http://mellan.dyndns.org/apps/andreas/index.php with only partial functionality especially regarding the tex.
You mention blahtex above, what about itex2MML? I’ve managed to get it compiled as a PHP extension if you’re interested.
nLab page on 9 Dream notes July 2012 part II