Recently, my colleague Julia and I made a Python script to support outreach to faculty. You can read about our attempts to document the project here. Because deploying a script like this can be difficult for librarians who are sometimes unfamiliar with Python, we thought it might be useful to sidestep some of the complexity… Continue reading Creating a desktop application using Python
DNS
I’ve had some adventures with DNS recently. DNS resolves domain names to IP addresses, so it, uh, mostly just looks things up. It won’t forward traffic, or resolve the path in a url to some other path, or anything like that. It won’t help you serve things over HTTPS. It just translates domain names to… Continue reading DNS
On documentation
Two weeks ago, Julia Furay and I presented a poster at ACRL 2019 about automating a library outreach initiative with Python. The presentation went well; people seemed interested in the project. But talking to librarians at the conference really got us thinking about how to make our code more reusable. If others want to use… Continue reading On documentation
The unpredictability of bots
I recently made a Mastodon bot that didn’t really turn out how I expected. My goal was for it to be a bit cheeky, by being a bot who poses as a scholar. That’s not how it comes across. Rather, it presents itself as pedantic and over-confident. I suppose I could tweak it to make… Continue reading The unpredictability of bots
Contributing
I’ve recently had the honor of contributing to an open source project called ephemetoot. It’s a project by Hugh Rundle that auto-deletes your old Mastodon posts. I’ve wanted to contribute more to open source projects for a while now, but finding the right project is surprisingly hard to do. Hugh’s project appealed to me for… Continue reading Contributing
Learning the conceptual stuff
Because I’m a self-taught programmer, and still very much a beginner, there’s a lot of computer science theory that I’m totally unaware of. Yet I’m now beginning to see the value of classic theoretical solutions to common programming problems. When you can immediately identify a problem as being solvable with, say, a concept like a… Continue reading Learning the conceptual stuff
Friday thoughts on greenOA
As Kingsborough’s representative for CUNY Academic Works, our university’s institutional repository, I help faculty share their publications freely and openly online. This is useful work, because it increases the visibility of their work, and allows many people around the world to access scholarship that might otherwise have been unavailable to them. The institutional repository provides… Continue reading Friday thoughts on greenOA
Fuzzy string matching
A few months ago, I wrote about a tool I made called the Fictograph, which graphs the awesomeness of authors’ works over time. It leans heavily on data from the Goodreads API. I expected the Goodreads API to be reliable, but it turns out it has some design problems. For example, if you query an… Continue reading Fuzzy string matching
Keeping librarians up to date on electronic products
Teaching librarians usually want to stay atop the latest changes to their institution’s electronic products to be able to teach research skills effectively. As an instructor, it’s important to be comfortable using the latest features of the various services. However, keeping up can be a challenge. Vendors regularly roll out updates, but these aren’t always… Continue reading Keeping librarians up to date on electronic products
Build small
Software can sometimes be big and unwieldly. But it doesn’t have to be. Software can also be small, unimportant and ephemeral. Software can have small goals and limited use cases. It can be fun to build and deploy. There is a lot of value in building small applications for libraries. Here are some benefits: Building… Continue reading Build small
