Over the past two weeks, I put together a “status page” for our library services. It’s not live yet, but I hope to make it public soon. Basically the page gathers HTTP response codes by submitting GET requests for each of our outside services (website, collections, and other services like ILLiad, Primo, and EZproxy), and […]
In 2021, I posted about how I was planning to stay home by myself for the Thanksgiving weekend and work on writing code for my Open Journal Matcher project. I then went on about how great it was. So this year I’m going to do the Thanksgiving programming challenge again. The premise is simple: stay […]
The cheap Chromebook I bought last year is starting to flake out. The keyboard is becoming less responsive; the left shift key has become particularly troublesome. I’m realizing that you can only expect so much mileage out of a $300 machine. It has been my daily driver for a year, so I think it has […]
Despite doing a lot of writing over the past few years, I’m definitely not a well-seasoned editor. If I’m being honest with myself, I’m not critical enough: I’m too willing to say “yes, this is fine.” But with some texts, strong criticism is definitely needed. I also sometimes feel that my edits are too superficial, […]
Over on the Springshare Lounge, I was asked for some detail about how our new augmented reality game works, so I posted the text below. I thought it might also be useful to share this here… This [AR game] was built on a new Group Homepage, starting with a completely empty Homepage Template. Starting with […]
This was the first week of the fall semester, so our augmented reality (AR) game went live to students for the first time. Prof. Carrie Jedlicka did a ton of work to make this happen. The game worked on more phones than I thought it would (>90%?), which was a nice surprise. The students seemed […]
I’ve set up an account on tildegit to mirror some of our library’s most important GitHub repos. On the one hand, this is simply a backup: another way to get at our code should something go particularly awry. On the other hand, this may point to a new direction for our library. I have been […]
One thing I’ve come to recognize over my time as a programmer is where my limits lie. I’m not a super talented programmer: I started too late in life; and I have a job as a librarian, which prevents me from learning about code full time. So I do what I can. The problem with […]
I’ve been interested in gemini for quite a while now. It’s a protocol that serves up plain text with hyperlinks, and that’s about it. It’s pretty much the most minimal experience of the internet that you can imagine. I think people like gemini for (1) its obscurity. From what I can tell, your odds of […]
I’ve been building some web stuff recently with a JavaScript library that seems to be well past its prime. A couple of years is a long time in JS-land. I deliberately won’t name the library, because my intention here isn’t to criticize; rather I want to point out some of the challenges of working with […]
