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 […]
Since our library has had LibGuides, there has been a long-simmering desire among the librarians to standardize the layout of our guides. In fact, a few years ago we attempted to do this by building a standardized template that the librarians were encouraged to use. But this voluntary standardization did not work at all. The […]
Usually code works for a while, until it doesn’t. That happened to me this week with new-books-desktop, my desktop application for producing our monthly new books list. I had recently lost the virtualenv that was being used to build the executable to a replaced hard drive, and was hoping that it would be easy enough […]
Once a project is built, one important thing that doesn’t get discussed enough is maintenance. Maintaining web projects is essential but mostly underappreciated. It usually doesn’t get you much reward. But web applications are living things that need tending to. This means updating dependencies, but also thoughtfully revisiting the project on a regular basis to […]
