Announcing Glass Notebook - Publish Interactive Pluto Notebooks from GitHub

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@ctrekker and I are excited to announce our new service, Glass Notebook, which we have been working on for the past two years. Glass Notebook is a service that allows users to link any GitHub repository to our site and generate an interactive (or static if preferred) site composed of Pluto notebooks in one click, similar to index — Interactive Computational Thinking — MIT. Our backend uses a modified form of PlutoSliderServer.jl, which allows users to host Pluto notebooks with interactive Sliders, TextFields, and any other @binded elements.

We are aware that there are still some rough edges, but we want to announce this to the general Julia community and gauge interest by inviting you to join our waitlist. The waitlist will help us determine the level of interest from the Julia community for our service. You can sign up for the waitlist at our website https://www.glass-notebook.com.

We plan to offer a free version of our service for static notebooks and an affordable option for individuals priced somewhere around $5-10 a month for interactive notebook exports. Our goal is to make it easy for users to publish static and interactive notebooks just by linking their GitHub account. The more users that Glass Notebook has, the cheaper we can make this - hence this announcement will help us plan around that! (Also, we plan on implementing pre-computed interactive Pluto notebook publishing capabilities in the near future, which will drastically reduce the cost of hosting for us and eventual users.)

If you’re interested in our service, please visit the link (https://www.glass-notebook.com), and we will keep you updated on our progress and upcoming developments.

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That sounds fantastic!

Unfortunately, after joining the waitlist, the link to the sample repo yields this

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Thanks for pointing out the issue, it should be fixed now!

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Concerning the sample notebooks:

Are they interactive? I don’t notice any reaction to the slider?

If I am missing something, probably it would be nice to have something that doesn’t need domain expertise. (I don’t know what to look for)

E.g. a very simple notebook with just one line plot – whose slope is controlled by a slider.

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They are simply static examples right now, but @ctrekker is going to post a simple interactive example by tomorrow!

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Updated the website sign up form and included a demo video showing how glass notebook works! Also included an interactive example. Feel free to check them out!

Interactive example notebook
Updated website with demo video

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How interactivity is managed ? Is the full notebook running or do you use precomputed data based on PlutoSliderServer ?

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@ctrekker can add more details because he’s the one building out all of the backend. But yes, we use a modified version of PlutoSliderServer to track only the interactive portions of the notebook. Eventually we will also implement a pre-computed PlutoSliderServer option which will allow for “static” hosting of interactive notebooks

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@j-fu Notebooks with sliders are always running so that even notebooks with large “slider spaces” are still interactive. We will be supporting precomputed values soon though!

There are, of course, a few limitations. For one, notebooks must adhere to certain (fairly flexible) memory restrictions. Currently notebooks/repositories are run on machines with 8 GB of RAM, which should be enough for most cases. Here’s a notebook that tracks system info: Export Tracker.jl

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All future conversations will be held here, just FYI!