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 […]
I’ve been working on an augmented reality (AR) tour game for our Fall library orientation. Basically, you wander around the library with your phone camera turned on, and you’ll find some shapes floating in the virtual space, by the reference desk, the circulation desk, and so on. When you collect all the shapes you get […]
I am a long-time user of vim. Vim is a terminal-based text editor. It can be expanded through all sorts of plug-ins to give you something similar to an IDE. I have tried other coding environments: fancy IDEs, with lots of features. Even when I apply the vim key-bindings in those environments, I still don’t […]
I buy a lot of really bad books on Amazon. They’re minor books, on fringe topics, and they’re usually well out of date. They’re also usually incredibly cheap, like two or three dollars, or some such. And while they’re generally pretty uninteresting, they can often offer a citation to support a minor point in a […]
So I set up Copilot last night. Copilot is GitHub’s AI that helps with writing code. I don’t think I’d pay the list price of $10/month for this type of service, but it is free to anyone with a GitHub educator account, which was enough to prompt me to try it. Needless to say I […]
While I was very optimistic about Vue Single File Components (SFCs) a few posts ago, I’ve been having some trouble implementing them in LibGuides. While you can upload whatever JavaScript you want to a LibGuides group (as “Customization Files”), I’m beginning to realize that the LibGuides interface really wasn’t meant to accommodate a SFC workflow. […]
In my last post I talked about pushing back on the complexity of JavaScript frameworks. Now I’m thinking about taking this further. In the name of maintainability, I think I am going to make an alternate version of our library page: a “minimum viable website”. I’ll strip out as much of the JavaScript as absolutely […]
Lately, I’ve been trying to push forward with best practices for our library webpage. This has meant moving toward Vue and moving away from jQuery. The result is a more modern site. While a lot of the changes that I’ve made recently have been invisible to the end user, there has been a lot of […]
