Mark Eaton

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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-p […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 wri […]

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 l […]

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 t […]

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 natur […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 app […]

I’ve created a mastodon bot that can keep you updated on new posts.

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 rev […]

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 w […]

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 a […]