Programming around dates, times, and timezones is painful. I’ve done this in Python and in JavaScript and it was miserable either way. It’s due to the complexities of time that we mostly ignore in our day to day lives. We are able to do this because we generally are not in multiple timezones at the… Continue reading Time
Hours widget
When we built the current library webpage in 2021, I wrote a homemade widget in JavaScript to display the library’s hours. It has worked consistently since then without any problems, perhaps surprisingly, since the code is very ugly. This original version of the widget drew upon a custom JSON file with the hours data, which… Continue reading Hours widget
Languages and idiom
This summer, I’ve been going to a French speaking meetup in Crown Heights on Friday evenings. It’s a nice to end the week by simply sitting outside and chatting in French. It’s got me thinking about natural and programming languages. My ideas on this are probably very naive, so please forgive me, and feel free… Continue reading Languages and idiom
The last days of the Open Journal Matcher
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
FontAwesome
Probably unsurprisingly, at one point on our website journey our Website Committee wanted icons. Icons are useful, right? They provide a somewhat standardized way of communicating the complex metaphors that are the currency of web design. But icons are not surprisingly not an easy problem to solve. Sure, you can find any number of icons… Continue reading FontAwesome
What’s next with learning JavaScript
I confess that I mostly use JavaScript as if it were an extension of CSS. What I mean is that I am mostly using it to manipulate elements in the DOM, usually for appearance’s sake. I’m not building applications, or even using JS in a systematic way to solve problems that require some kind of… Continue reading What’s next with learning JavaScript
Now you can follow this blog in the fediverse
I’ve created a mastodon bot that can keep you updated on new posts.
Revisions
We’ve reached peak summer in New York City, so most everyone is at the beach, and the library is in a state of summer hibernation. The librarians are still in the office of course, and we’ve been working on revisions to the library website. Our goal is to have a revised site live by the… Continue reading Revisions
LTI
My colleague Jeffrey Delgado and I have been setting up Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) to integrate our library’s LibGuides with the broader campus BlackBoard ecosystem. The advantage of this is that it will put library content in more course shells, and hopefully extend the reach of our guides and our other web content. The downside,… Continue reading LTI
UX
A few months ago, our campus Communications Department asked us if we wanted feedback on our library webpage. Naturally, we said yes, and then didn’t hear anything for a while. But now the feedback has arrived! It is extensive. I think our Website Committee was a bit shocked at how much feedback we got, and… Continue reading UX
