For almost five years now, our library has been archiving tweets about our college. I’ve posted about that here and here. Until recently, I didn’t really have an agenda for this data, other than preserving it. Last week that changed. At our college’s Data Faculty Interest Group, I mentioned the tweet archive as a potentially […]
Author Archives: Mark Eaton
Recommending journals programmatically
I had been keeping this project under my hat, but I’ve proposed it as a conference talk now, so maybe it’s time to share. I’ve been building a journal recommender tool. It’s aimed at faculty, and is built on data from the Directory of Open Access Journals. The idea is that a faculty member could […]
Posted in doaj, journal recommender
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The modern web
I’ve been learning some JavaScript recently. Mostly this is so that I can better understand modern JS frameworks. I have some catching up to do: it has been a while since I looked at JavaScript. Anyhow, my main takeaway from learning (a very small amount) about React and Vue.js is that the DOM isn’t what […]
Posted in javascript
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On podcasts
I spend more time than I’d like to on the New York City subway. It’s mostly boring, punctuated by occasional dramatic failures, where getting to your destination seems almost impossible. In any case, I find that my time on the subway needs to be put to use with some productive activity, or I would totally […]
On testing code
Unit testing seems like a very sensible thing to do. Having tests that ensure that your code is doing what you expect is an obviously good idea. I’m a very cautious person by nature, so testing appeals to me very strongly. Nonetheless I’ve been slow to add it to my workflow. In part this is […]
Posted in testing
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Pi-hole
I’ve had a Raspberry Pi sitting around my office for quite a while. I bought it in a brief moment of enthusiasm for hardware that quickly faded, so it has mostly sat around in the box unused. I think the main reason I neglected it is because I hadn’t come up with a compelling use […]
Posted in networking, pi-hole
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Creating a desktop application using Python
Recently, my colleague Julia and I made a Python script to support outreach to faculty. You can read about our attempts to document the project here. Because deploying a script like this can be difficult for librarians who are sometimes unfamiliar with Python, we thought it might be useful to sidestep some of the complexity […]
Posted in desktop application
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DNS
I’ve had some adventures with DNS recently. DNS resolves domain names to IP addresses, so it, uh, mostly just looks things up. It won’t forward traffic, or resolve the path in a url to some other path, or anything like that. It won’t help you serve things over HTTPS. It just translates domain names to […]
Posted in dns
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On documentation
Two weeks ago, Julia Furay and I presented a poster at ACRL 2019 about automating a library outreach initiative with Python. The presentation went well; people seemed interested in the project. But talking to librarians at the conference really got us thinking about how to make our code more reusable. If others want to use […]
Posted in conference, documentation
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The unpredictability of bots
I recently made a Mastodon bot that didn’t really turn out how I expected. My goal was for it to be a bit cheeky, by being a bot who poses as a scholar. That’s not how it comes across. Rather, it presents itself as pedantic and over-confident. I suppose I could tweak it to make […]
