Author Archives: Mark Eaton

Top 10

By Mark Eaton | Published: September 7, 2022

I just noticed that in the WordPress classic editor, you can list your blog’s top 10 most used tags! If this were 2005, I would make a word cloud! For your amusement or interest, here they are for this blog: learning journal recommender LibGuides Python JavaScript Twitter Google Mastodon API homepage

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Fall is here

By Mark Eaton | Published: September 7, 2022

The fall semester is starting this week, so it’s a natural inflection point in the academic year. Our departmental website committee wrapped up our summer weekly meetings last week, committed all the code we’d written over the past few months, and made it live. Things are going to shift dramatically in September. I’ll be spending […]

Posted in eresources, homepage | Comments closed

Time

By Mark Eaton | Published: August 26, 2022

Programming around dates, times, and timezones is painful. I’ve done this in Python and in JavaScript and it was miserable either way. It’s due to the complexities of time that we mostly ignore in our day to day lives. We are able to do this because we generally are not in multiple timezones at the […]

Posted in javascript, python, time | Comments closed

Hours widget

By Mark Eaton | Published: August 18, 2022

When we built the current library webpage in 2021, I wrote a homemade widget in JavaScript to display the library’s hours. It has worked consistently since then without any problems, perhaps surprisingly, since the code is very ugly. This original version of the widget drew upon a custom JSON file with the hours data, which […]

Posted in javascript, libguides, widgets | Comments closed

Languages and idiom

By Mark Eaton | Published: August 6, 2022

This summer, I’ve been going to a French speaking meetup in Crown Heights on Friday evenings. It’s a nice to end the week by simply sitting outside and chatting in French. It’s got me thinking about natural and programming languages. My ideas on this are probably very naive, so please forgive me, and feel free […]

Posted in language, meetup | Comments closed

The last days of the Open Journal Matcher

By Mark Eaton | Published: July 29, 2022

Yesterday I took the Open Journal Matcher offline. It had a good run of just over two years. I was reaching the limits of my comfort level maintaining this kind of production system. Technical debt had built up, and my enthusiasm for maintaining the project had ebbed. My hope is that someone will pick up […]

Posted in journal recommender | Comments closed

FontAwesome

By Mark Eaton | Published: July 28, 2022

Probably unsurprisingly, at one point on our website journey our Website Committee wanted icons. Icons are useful, right? They provide a somewhat standardized way of communicating the complex metaphors that are the currency of web design. But icons are not surprisingly not an easy problem to solve. Sure, you can find any number of icons […]

Posted in fontawesome, icons | Comments closed

What’s next with learning JavaScript

By Mark Eaton | Published: July 19, 2022

I confess that I mostly use JavaScript as if it were an extension of CSS. What I mean is that I am mostly using it to manipulate elements in the DOM, usually for appearance’s sake. I’m not building applications, or even using JS in a systematic way to solve problems that require some kind of […]

Posted in javascript, learning | Comments closed

Now you can follow this blog in the fediverse

By Mark Eaton | Published: July 16, 2022

I’ve created a mastodon bot that can keep you updated on new posts.

Posted in mastodon | Comments closed

Revisions

By Mark Eaton | Published: July 16, 2022

We’ve reached peak summer in New York City, so most everyone is at the beach, and the library is in a state of summer hibernation. The librarians are still in the office of course, and we’ve been working on revisions to the library website. Our goal is to have a revised site live by the […]

Posted in committees, homepage, summer | Comments closed