Vue

I was doing two things earlier this week: sitting in on a webinar about a neat library tool called Unsub; and thinking about digging further into Vue, the JavaScript framework. Anyhow, I was so impressed with the UI of Unsub that I looked up what I could about their tech stack (it’s on GitHub), and… Continue reading Vue

Ubuntu

It’s now been a couple of years that I’ve been running Ubuntu as my daily driver. I had been on MacOS, but my MacBook was very old, and I was swayed by Dell’s XPS series laptops that came with Ubuntu preinstalled. As a newcomer to Linux, not having to install the OS myself was a… Continue reading Ubuntu

Bootstrap and LibGuides

What is Bootstrap, and what can it do for my LibGuides? Bootstrap is the framework that underpins LibGuides, and you’ll find it gives you much more control over how your LibGuides work. Bootstrap provides a collection of CSS and JavaScript components that will help you build responsive web pages. Gaining an understanding of how Bootstrap… Continue reading Bootstrap and LibGuides

LibGuides (part 2)

At the outset, it is possible to overlook features of LibGuides CMS such as groups and their accompanying permissions. But groups can be useful, since they can describe organizational realities, so you may find that they’re helpful to you at some point in your LibGuides journey. For us, LibGuides was a powerful tool to organize… Continue reading LibGuides (part 2)

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Sushi

A couple of years ago, I started building a Sushi client. Sushi is a protocol for accessing standardized usage reports from our vendors. These reports, called Counter reports, quantitatively describe the usage of our electronic collections. I needed a client because at the time we didn’t have any automated way to gather these reports. It… Continue reading Sushi

Reaching in

I am a fan of technologies that you can reach into. I mean this metaphorically, of course. I like computing tools that you can tinker with and make your own. Usually – although not always – these are openly licensed, and usually they deliberately have these affordances. As an occasional teacher of technical workshops, I… Continue reading Reaching in

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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

Into the strangeness

There’s a lot of strangeness writing JavaScript for the web. The edge cases are sometimes mind-bending. This is sometimes not the fault of JavaScript itself, but can be due to the other, non-JS things that the browser is doing. I ran into such problems recently when modifying a widget that provides access to our library’s… Continue reading Into the strangeness

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LibGuides

These days, I’m really working hard at improving the library’s web presence. In part, this means moving more content over to LibGuides. As a result, we’re using more of the features of LibGuides, specifically lots of custom JavaScript and CSS. It’s nice to be tapping some of these more advanced features, and it has been… Continue reading LibGuides