It is probably very nerdy that I am as excited as I am to join something called the Alma Extensibility Task Force. It’s basically a committee to work with the Alma APIs, and I am totally here for it. There are a bunch of reasons for this: It’s a chance to work with some stellar […]
It looks like it might be the end of the road for our bot that archives tweets about Kingsborough Community College. Recently, the official @twitterdev account announced the impending end to the free tier of the Twitter API. On top of that, Mr. Musk himself suggested that the new replacement basic paid tier should cost […]
Right now, as I type, I’m downloading the latest English-language abstracts from the Directory of Open Access Journals API. This is something I do periodically, to refresh the data used by the Open Journal Matcher. I do this regularly in part because new journal articles are published all the time, and it’s obviously valuable to […]
Since (for now) the Open Journal Matcher is built without using a proper task queue, I’ve been spending a lot of effort handling the various errors thrown by my Google Cloud Function. This is both satisfying and annoying: it is nice to catch and handle each error properly, but it takes some digging to figure […]
A few months ago, I wrote about a tool I made called the Fictograph, which graphs the awesomeness of authors’ works over time. It leans heavily on data from the Goodreads API. I expected the Goodreads API to be reliable, but it turns out it has some design problems. For example, if you query an […]
This week I rewrote SeeCollections, a data visualization application that I had originally built in 2015. The rewrite was sorely needed, for a couple of reasons: The original code was really bad. Which is to be expected; I was a beginner when I wrote it. The newer code is better. It’s clearer. It went from […]
I’ve enjoyed being on Mastodon for the past year. It reminds me of how Twitter was in the early days. But Mastodon’s decentralized structure means that I find it hard to wrap my head around the entirety of the fediverse. For better or worse, I only see the parts that are adjacent to my instance. […]
APIs are useful for librarians. There are many things we can do with API data to benefit our libraries. But we don’t have to only make practical tools; we can also make things that are a bit silly. For example, I made a tool I’ve called the Fictograph, which lets you plot the awesomeness of […]
