Last night, I tried to start a post about the current state of Mastodon, but I couldn’t really formulate anything that wasn’t overly emotive. I tapped out a few words, looked at the screen for about an hour, and then gave up and went to bed. Others have done much better than I could: Hugh… Continue reading A strange month for Mastodon
Break everything day
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… Continue reading Break everything day
Avec le temps
Dramatic news about Twitter, like we’ve seen in the past week, always drives a big influx of people to Mastodon. Mastodon, part of a larger decentralized federation of communities called the fediverse, is my social medium of choice. On a superficial level, Mastodon is very Twitter-like. The culture though, is very different. New arrivals to… Continue reading Avec le temps
Debian on a Chromebook
I recently (and very unexpectedly) bought a Lenovo Chromebook. The reason was that my Dell XPS laptop fell apart rather spectacularly and I was without a computer. The Chromebook is a cheapish stop-gap until I can afford to buy another “real” laptop. To be clear, I wasn’t too excited about the prospect of using a… Continue reading Debian on a Chromebook
Smashing
Last week I attended Smashing Conference, which is apparently a conference of somewhat long standing in the field of front-end development, or so I am told. I opted for the online version, rather than in person, because it was cheaper, and because I was out of town on the conference days. So I logged in… Continue reading Smashing
In which we puzzle over what is a “framework”
As I move more of our website’s code to the idiom of Vue.js, I wonder how to best explain this to my colleagues. Vue is commonly referred to as a “framework”, but this is not super enlightening to a non-programmer. It can be a bit hard to explain what Vue does, because it deals in… Continue reading In which we puzzle over what is a “framework”
In which, undeterred, I try to figure out what to write next
One never-ending challenge for faculty is finding things to write about. The problem is especially acute for those on the tenure track, but it really applies to almost anyone in a faculty role. Moreover, coming up with the wrong idea can be a real setback. It’s possible to spend months working on a topic before… Continue reading In which, undeterred, I try to figure out what to write next
From the archive
I recently dug up an old paper about indexing that I never published. It’s pretty brief, but I think the main argument still stands, so I’ve shared it on CUNY Academic Works. Maybe of interest if you’re interested in indexing, or the politics of software. Here are the details: Title: Automation, Abstraction and Building It… Continue reading From the archive
Top 10
I just noticed that in the WordPress classic editor, you can list your blog’s top 10 most used tags! If this were 2005, I would make a word cloud! For your amusement or interest, here they are for this blog: learning journal recommender LibGuides Python JavaScript Twitter Google Mastodon API homepage
Fall is here
The fall semester is starting this week, so it’s a natural inflection point in the academic year. Our departmental website committee wrapped up our summer weekly meetings last week, committed all the code we’d written over the past few months, and made it live. Things are going to shift dramatically in September. I’ll be spending… Continue reading Fall is here
