I have recently (yesterday) launched a new mathematical site called MathOnline. Here one can collect lecture notes, survey articles, books and so on. All the material can be organized and searched by author, topic, language, level and so on.

Registered users can add new books, add tags, write reviews, vote, keep a list of the favorite books and see other people's profiles. The level is usually from university mathematics on, even if it is possible to add elementary resources.

The site is just born, and every contribution is appreciated. You can simply use it to to find material, or better you can register and contribute, or advertise it with your colleagues and interested people. More features will be added on the way, and every advice is welcome!

My question here is the following: is there an opportunity to advertise it (if you like the idea and the realization) in some way on MO or here in meta? Of course, as with every site with user-generated content, the more public exposure it gets, the more opportunity it has to become a repository of useful material.

Thank you very much for the advertising, but I should tell you that Andrea is actually a male name here in Italy! :-)

Too bad, we lost another female user! (Seriously, I just looked at the first 5 pages and could not find any female name. At some point the MO community may have to address this staggering imbalance).

Andrea: this looks great (this morning I saw it briefly). I am trying to open it now, but seems the server is down, may be because of David's advertisement?

By the way, may I suggest you rephrase the part of the FAQ where it says "Can I link material protected by copyright?" Almost everything you are linking to is protected by copyright in the sense that the authors retain the copyright, and it would be illegal to republish it or incorporate wholesale into another work. This is simply material that the copyright holders have chosen to distribute freely to interested readers. I think you mean "Can I link to material which has been distributed without the copyright holders permission?"

@David: Your suggestion is good, I will change the FAQ. I will only able to make modifications to the site on next week, though.

@Jonas: What operating system are using? I use a different font in Windows, since there are known problems with the cleartype technology and the rendering of fonts in many browsers. As for the users profile: yes, this is one of the things I plan to change, but again, I will be able to work on the site only on next week.

Thank you very much for your suggestions!

The site is great. I had been thinking of a similar idea(but not this one) for over an year. Great work.

As of now, it is a subdomain of andreaferretti.it ... Would it be possible to have a full domain for itself?

Yes, but some other one? Some italian word, perhaps?

How hard would it be to add openid support? I imagine it's far from trivial, or meta.MO would have it for sure. But having seen how well it works on MO, I am beginning to miss it everywhere.

It would be hard to program everything from the scratch and include openid. Perhaps some content management system like Drupal or Joomla might have built-in support for openid and if so that would be the simpler way.

Edit: I just checked and found that both joomla and drupal have openid support. So for sites designed using these, everything should be easy enough.

Well, a lot of question, so let me answer in order.

@domain: I stupidly thought about the name and designed the logo before I checked for available domains. I'd need a new name and logo to change. If anyone is willing to provide suggestions for a name, I may try to change the logo (but any help with that would be appreciated too).

@editing books: I'm all for that, but what is a good way to prevent vandalism? Maybe I should just relax and do it the wikipedia way. I was thinking about a button to contact moderators to suggest problems with the book (wrong info, outdated link, irrelevant material, spam and so on) but maybe this will not be feasible if the site grows larger. Even more considering that for now I'm the only moderator (but I'm more than happy to give moderation powers to interested users with high MO reputation, as soon as I design easier tools for editing books).

@openid: I don't know if that is easy or difficult, I will investigate. In any case, the site is programmed from scratch in CakePHP and Jamal/Jquery, and I'm not willing to port it to a CMS; that would be far more work than adding the openid.

@the v sign is bad: I already received a similar suggestion, so it will probably change into a lens. And yes, I may let the title be clickable too.

@autosuggestion: It already is there. If you just start typing "miln" you will be prompted with the full name. I @better interface: I agree that I may show the rating and the number of reviews on the front page. I was also thinking at a voting system on reviews, much like on MO, in order to show the highest rated review on top. I am less convinced about moving the logout button away from the top. If other users have some opinion on this, please tell me.

I hope I will be able to implement all this stuff next week. I knew there where a lot of things to fix, but I thought it would be better to launch the site and hear people suggestions rather than making it perfect for me before actually having any content.

What do you mean exactly? Do you get to the page where you can write and the review does not get added, or you are not able to get to the review page at all?

EDIT: I tried to add a review and it worked for me, but I get redirected to the wrong page (so I guess it works just because I'm admin). This is strange, as everything is working well in my local install. I'm really sorry that such a bug made it to the final version, and I'm fixing it as soon as possible.

EDIT2: I'm now starting to understand. It seems the people at my hosting service made a mess with the filesystem and did not recover everything correctly. I'm not even able to access the relevant files via FTP! I have to reinstall it to fix this, and I'm doing it as soon as possible, probably monday.

I don't know the difference between cakePHP and ordinary PHP, but there are PHP libraries for openid support: http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/ which may be of some use (if you do take a look at them, please let me know how easy it is to do - I'd like to get openid working for the nForum (which would then work here as well)).

Oh, by the way, why do you have a bunch of pictures of books that we're not allowed to post on the front page? Shouldn't it instead be 100-page stacks of pages with a large number of staples going down the left side creating a faux-spine?

MathOnline - "Because nobody will know if you abuse your department's printer." =)

I don't have a camera either, which is unfortunate because I have probably two thousand printed pages from books and notes that I may one day read =D.

I have implemented most of the changes requested (not openid yet) but I have some trouble uploading them because of some problems with my hosting service (something happened to the filesystem and the permission went all wrong). I think I will wait to have openid and try to upload all together.

Oh, by the way, is there any chance you could enable commenting on submissions, flagging for duplicates, and a vote count next to the rating that is currently there?

Are the page and "next" buttons not working for anyone else when looking at specific subjects?

Also, my confirmation e-mail was caught by my spam filter. If it can happen to me it can happen to others so maybe the confirmation e-mail should be modified to help prevent this.

Thank you all for your comments. I have fixed some things and implemented some new features, but I have problems uploading them online, since I need some information which I have on my laptop, which in turn is... well, a volcanic cloud away from me :-)

As for the mail resulting as spam, this is very unfortunate. I did not have this problem, and I have a Gmail account, but I will investigate. I do not know how to persuade the Gmail people that what I'm sending is not spam, though. :-(

@Andrea: be sure to have your messages have the evil bit turned off, of course! :)

I have made an upgrade, following some of the suggestion given here and in other places. There is still a lot of work to do, but I have improved some things. In particular you can now login through OpenId. Among the things I did not implement yet is the star rating on the front page and probably something else suggested here.

I also added a button to report issues with a book (incorrect data, broken links and so on), and these reports go to moderators, which can then edit the book.

For now I am the only moderator, but I'd be willing to give moderation powers to other users. In particular to any high reputation (>= me) user of MathOverflow, so please contact me if you are interested. Otherwise I think I will just browse the list of subscribed users and look for known names :-)

Ah, and please let me know if any of the bugs mentioned is still present.

@geraldedgar: It's not really a question, so it doesn't fit the MO framework very well, but I take your point that it's worth posting in front of more eyeballs. I've added as an answer to the question about math resources on the web.

See also this answer by Andrea.

Mathonline doesn't have a message board, and everyone who visits there is from here. I mean, one might argue that this is meta.MO, but this topic isn't hurting anyone, so I can't see why we shouldn't just discuss it here.

I would love to have only one message board to check....

Thank you very much :-)