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… Continue reading The last days of the Open Journal Matcher
Category: journal recommender
Thanksgiving debrief
So I followed through on my plan to spend the Thanksgiving holiday by myself, working on the Open Journal Matcher. It went fine. I put in four straight days in front of vim, and I’m pretty sure that I more or less cracked the problem that I was trying to solve. The goal was to… Continue reading Thanksgiving debrief
Status update
I’d like to share a status update on the Open Journal Matcher. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a grant to refactor and make the OJM more sustainable. I’m considering two different approaches to the rewritten OJM. The first relies entirely on PythonAnywhere, while the second still involves Google Cloud Platform. This post describes where… Continue reading Status update
One year of Open Journal Matcher
Today marks one year since I first launched the Open Journal Matcher. Since that time, it has averaged about 5.9K hits per month (although of course some of those are bots). It has also been included on various LibGuides here and there. It is nice that librarians out there value this work. One thing that… Continue reading One year of Open Journal Matcher
The latest abstracts
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… Continue reading The latest abstracts
Open Journal Matcher gets further funding
I just found out that I was awarded a PSC-CUNY Research Grant to fund the Open Journal Matcher! The grant will pay the bills for the OJM for a while, and will also allow me to develop it further. Previously, the project had been funded by Google. I have two specific goals for this grant.… Continue reading Open Journal Matcher gets further funding
Costs of development
Developing a project, even a small one, can be expensive. From when I started working on the Open Journal Matcher in earnest (in January) to when it was more or less complete in its current form (in the beginning of October), I probably spent about $1000 of my grant money. To me, this is a… Continue reading Costs of development
Building incrementally
As soon as I finished the Open Journal Matcher and released it to the world, I wanted to rewrite it from the ground up. When I looked at the code, it was clear that so much could be improved: from better variable names, to clearer flow, and more concise functionality. I had to resist the… Continue reading Building incrementally
Slow down, be thorough
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… Continue reading Slow down, be thorough
On variable costs
Now that the Open Journal Matcher is live and receiving traffic, I’m wondering how much it is going to cost to keep running. There isn’t an obvious answer. Mostly this is because Google Cloud Functions scale with your project. This is definitely good for scalability and availability, but it makes it much more difficult to… Continue reading On variable costs
