Author Archives: Mark Eaton

In praise of Bootstrap

While I’m pretty sure that it is very out of style by now, I still really like the aesthetics and functionality of Bootstrap. As an example of its utility, I recently coded up a quick, off-the-cuff static page with Bootstrap. I could make it look nice with only one ‹link› tag and no JS or […]

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OJS

Our library is OJS-curious these days, so I thought I’d set up a test instance so that we can kick the tires. This post is a quick summary of the steps needed to get this working: Install KVM and virt-manager (and dependencies) on my laptop, to create and manage virtual machines. Spend quite a while […]

Posted in debian, ojs, vm | Leave a comment

Code4Lib 2025

The annual Code4Lib conference was earlier this week, and as always, it was inspiring and motivating. This was my 5th Code4Lib, and it has become an important part of my professional life. Talks range from the very high-level to the very detailed, and it is testament to this community that they reliably inspire no matter […]

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Pivot

As I get older, I recognize that my capacity to contribute meaningful code to librarianship is diminishing. For me, coding was originally a backup plan: a career path that I could pursue if I didn’t get tenure. But it didn’t come to that, thankfully. Also, it turned out that I love coding, and that it […]

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Obligatory static site generator post

This past week, the CUNY Academic Commons — the home for this blog — was offline for a few days, as they were migrating to new hosting. Then, when it came back, you may have noticed that the theme for the blog was all wonky, and some of the functionality was not working. Anyhow, this […]

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Log

On Saturday, March 14th, 2020, the day after we were sent home on account of the plague’s arrival in New York, I started keeping a log of all of the work things that I did. With very few exceptions, I’ve kept logging every day since then. The log is now approaching 10,000 entries, so I […]

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Further into GitHub Actions

Since my last post, I’ve been moving more things over to GitHub Actions. It has been an interesting journey. Some things are pretty straightforward to port from PythonAnywhere Tasks. Others have puzzled me a bit more. As an example of the latter, I wanted to set up my rss-to-mastodon bot as a GitHub Action. It’s […]

Posted in git, github, shell, yaml | Comments closed

GitHub Actions

Today I moved some bots from PythonAnywhere over to GitHub Actions. This is a follow-up to my previous post about migrating the front-end of the bots over to mastodon.ocert.at. Now I’m modernizing the back-end with GitHub Actions. There were a few reasons for this switch: I get GitHub Pro services for free via the GitHub […]

Posted in git, github, pythonanywhere | Comments closed

Coding with those who show up

This week, I have a new paper out titled “Coding with those who show up: Two methodologies on technical committee work” in Information Technology and Libraries. It is licensed CC-BY-NC, so you can read it for free here. The point of the article is that the literature on “laissez-faire leadership” is disproportionately (and in my […]

Posted in leadership, research, writing | Comments closed

Eight months with Debian

I checked the date of my previous post, and it has been eight months that I have been running Debian on this old HP laptop. Here are a few things that have struck me about the move from Ubuntu: The desktop environment can be pretty much identical. I am still running Gnome now — as […]

Posted in debian, linux, ubuntu | Comments closed
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