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 […]
Author Archives: Mark Eaton
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
Leave a comment
Ubuntu
It’s now been a couple of years that I’ve been running Ubuntu as my daily driver. I had been on MacOS, but my MacBook was very old, and I was swayed by Dell’s XPS series laptops that came with Ubuntu preinstalled. As a newcomer to Linux, not having to install the OS myself was a […]
Bootstrap and LibGuides
What is Bootstrap, and what can it do for my LibGuides? Bootstrap is the framework that underpins LibGuides, and you’ll find it gives you much more control over how your LibGuides work. Bootstrap provides a collection of CSS and JavaScript components that will help you build responsive web pages. Gaining an understanding of how Bootstrap […]
LibGuides (part 2)
At the outset, it is possible to overlook features of LibGuides CMS such as groups and their accompanying permissions. But groups can be useful, since they can describe organizational realities, so you may find that they’re helpful to you at some point in your LibGuides journey. For us, LibGuides was a powerful tool to organize […]
Posted in libguides
Comments closed
Sushi
A couple of years ago, I started building a Sushi client. Sushi is a protocol for accessing standardized usage reports from our vendors. These reports, called Counter reports, quantitatively describe the usage of our electronic collections. I needed a client because at the time we didn’t have any automated way to gather these reports. It […]
Reaching in
I am a fan of technologies that you can reach into. I mean this metaphorically, of course. I like computing tools that you can tinker with and make your own. Usually – although not always – these are openly licensed, and usually they deliberately have these affordances. As an occasional teacher of technical workshops, I […]
Posted in learning
Comments closed
Costs of development
Developing a project, even a small one, can be expensive. From when I started working on the Open Journal Matcher in earnest (in January) to when it was more or less complete in its current form (in the beginning of October), I probably spent about $1000 of my grant money. To me, this is a […]
Posted in funding, journal recommender
Comments closed
Into the strangeness
There’s a lot of strangeness writing JavaScript for the web. The edge cases are sometimes mind-bending. This is sometimes not the fault of JavaScript itself, but can be due to the other, non-JS things that the browser is doing. I ran into such problems recently when modifying a widget that provides access to our library’s […]
Posted in javascript
Comments closed
LibGuides
These days, I’m really working hard at improving the library’s web presence. In part, this means moving more content over to LibGuides. As a result, we’re using more of the features of LibGuides, specifically lots of custom JavaScript and CSS. It’s nice to be tapping some of these more advanced features, and it has been […]
Posted in javascript, libguides
Comments closed
