For a number of years, all I wanted to spend my time on was code. This is apparently a common occurrence among new programmers. It is easy to get obsessed, over-focused and maniacal about learning programming. This can be very productive; it is also often a little bit unhealthy. Anyhow, I think I am recovering […]
Author Archives: Mark Eaton
One year of Open Journal Matcher
Today marks one year since I first launched the Open Journal Matcher. Since that time, it has averaged about 5.9K hits per month (although of course some of those are bots). It has also been included on various LibGuides here and there. It is nice that librarians out there value this work. One thing that […]
Posted in journal recommender
Comments closed
What’s next
My next programming project, which I’ve already started working on, is a tool that would help authors make indexes for their books. If this sounds rather niche, well, it really is. While I don’t want to give away my plans too much, I do want to say that I’ve been deeply dissatisfied with existing indexing […]
Jquery, bootstrap, vue
When I started at Kingsborough, I built a library homepage that I’ll call “the jquery site”. I was a bit behind the curve on web technologies, and the site very quickly seemed rather dated. The jquery site lingered on far too long, becoming increasingly problematic with each revision, until it was clear that it should […]
A return to Twarc
Our library started archiving tweets about our college in 2015. At first, our archive ran an archiving tool called Twarc, on SDF. SDF is a hobbyist programming community; it’s a dynamic place, full of enthusiastic tinkerers and notoriously unreliable infrastructure. The archive trundled along that way until 2017, when I switched it over to TCAT, […]
Posted in archives, pythonanywhere, tcat, twarc, twitter
Comments closed
The impostor and the RC
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on an application to participate in a programming retreat at the Recurse Center. Yet I haven’t been able to bring myself submit the application. It provokes too much anxiety. So today I sat myself down and thought it through. When I’m being most honest about it, I […]
Posted in imposter syndrome, recurse center
Comments closed
The latest abstracts
Right now, as I type, I’m downloading the latest English-language abstracts from the Directory of Open Access Journals API. This is something I do periodically, to refresh the data used by the Open Journal Matcher. I do this regularly in part because new journal articles are published all the time, and it’s obviously valuable to […]
Posted in api, doaj, journal recommender
Comments closed
Open Journal Matcher gets further funding
I just found out that I was awarded a PSC-CUNY Research Grant to fund the Open Journal Matcher! The grant will pay the bills for the OJM for a while, and will also allow me to develop it further. Previously, the project had been funded by Google. I have two specific goals for this grant. […]
Posted in funding, journal recommender
Comments closed
More on the strangeness of JavaScript
I am amazed at how JavaScript can do really strange things, and JavaScript developers just seem to be totally fine with it. Maybe it’s my own misperceptions, coming from Python (with my Pythonic assumptions) that are causing my bafflement. Or maybe JavaScript developers put up with these things because, hey, it’s the language of the […]
Posted in javascript
Comments closed
Vue
I was doing two things earlier this week: sitting in on a webinar about a neat library tool called Unsub; and thinking about digging further into Vue, the JavaScript framework. Anyhow, I was so impressed with the UI of Unsub that I looked up what I could about their tech stack (it’s on GitHub), and […]
Posted in javascript, vue
Comments closed
