This, here, is me trying it out. With any luck, the appearance of a new toy will get me back to actually blogging some more – it’s been winding down a bit much here lately.

In this post, Scott also offers, quite magnanimously, to setup and host subversion repositories for any mathematician who happens to want to start collaborating using subversion.

Which, to my mind, immediately prompts the question: why stop there? I’ve had ideas about setting up a free and easy to use platform for modern communication in the mathematical community before; but they were along the lines of duplicating wordpress.com‘s efforts; which isn’t really something that pays off on your efforts. Reading this, though, raised a new idea.

Why not setup a server – preferably with a university data center as backing – which dispenses free platforms with the following contents:

• Source control. Preferably option on subversion, git, mercurial – or some such selection of modern and wide-spread systems.
• Wiki, Blog, Ticket system – a wordpress installation, with LaTeX, and a Trac installation connected to the source control system in use would do quite well.
• Heavy access control: one of the worries I hear pronounced often is that running a blog with your mathematical ideas display the ideas to the world before you get to publish them, thus risking you getting scooped on your research. This worry would be, to some extent, ameliorated by serving things optionally over https, by having a decent and robust access control system, and by having draconian privacy statements for the site administration.
• LaTeX compile farm – why not set this thing up so that it can build your papers for you? That way we really end up building the mathematician’s sourceforge!

So, I guess this post is a call for volunteer implementers. I’ll launch the ideas in the fora I have access to – I’m headed for a faculty retreat tomorrow discussing a research project which seems to include Web2.0 for research communication as a topic, and will see if I can propose the ideas there; and it’s just the thing to discuss with the workgroup Information und Kommunikation of the DMV too. But just because I’m looking for people who want to run this in no way implies anyone reading this shouldn’t.

The original setting maps to Shift-key left of backspace-space, since it’s an accent key which I occasionally use for .. y’know .. accenting letters, and thus don’t want immediate output from. And M-x set-variable LaTeX-math-abbrev-prefix didn’t do anything close to what I expected.

Today, I, on a whim, go and search the auctex mailing list archives for this. And lo and behold! One of the first messages tells me that I need to do M-x customize-variable LaTeX-math-abbrev-prefix. So I do, and it has my changes already, but not committed, so after committing the changes I try it out and it just works!

This should speed up usage of Emacs for me a bit.

It turns out, though, that
1. The plugin jumps on quoted perl code, interpreting it as mathematics. Bad things ensue.
2. It needs valid XHTML, which has not been a priority so far – and trying to validate it, the validator chokes on the &’s in my LaTeX array expressions for LaTeXrender.

Oh bugger. No iTeX and MathML for me.