[IPython-dev] A 'static demo' mode for the notebook, so we could keep a more visible version of the examples up?

[Fernando Perez]

Hi folks,

I was just thinking: would it make sense to have something like a
`--no-kernels` flag to the notebook that would behave like a 'hard
read-only' mode, where the server would simply never instantiate any
kernel whatsoever (neither for a notebook nor exposing the cluster
tab)?

I'm thinking that such a flag would be very useful in order to run a
very safe notebook server to simply present the nicely rendered
version of all the files in it.  I'm specifically thinking this would
let us have a persistent address to show our example notebooks, for
which we currently resort to just pointing people to the repo:

https://github.com/ipython/ipython/tree/master/docs/examples/notebooks

This isn't a very useful way of showing that content to interested
users, but if we could run a persistent server without any risk that
would solve this problem easily for now.   Eventually we'll fold
high-quality notebook conversion into our built docs, etc, but this
seemed like a useful solution anyways...

Thoughts?

f