Category Archives: programming

Free Covers? From Google?

Posted on June 6, 2008 by

Tim Spalding writes about Google Book Search API, cover availability, and terms of service: In NGC4Lib: Basically, I’ve been told [I can't help but wonder: Told by whom? -JR] that I was wrong to promote the use of GBS for … Continue reading →

Posted in business, Practice, programming | 1 Comment

Search hints/related search?

Posted on May 12, 2008 by

So google and Yahoo both sometimes offer “related” searches, in a nice AJAXy popup. I don’t have time to find an example to show you, but I think most of you have seen it with Google at least. The firefox … Continue reading →

Posted in Practice, programming | 5 Comments

More on open access discoverability

Posted on May 8, 2008 by

This is worth pulling out into a post of it’s own. Thanks to Dorothea Salo for the comments on the post where I broached this issue sort of in passing. Good to know that I’m indeed not alone in worrying … Continue reading →

Posted in open access, Practice, programming | 6 Comments

“Freedom Summer of Code”

Posted on May 8, 2008 by

Freedom Summer of Code is a summer-of-code-style distributed collaboration for technology projects benefiting radical/progressive movements. Exciting idea. http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/Announcing_Freedom_Summer_of_Code (en) Riseup Labs is excited to announce the Freedom Summer of Code! We aim to advance critical movement technology projects and tools … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, programming | Leave a comment

Google feature changes; open access discoverability

Posted on May 7, 2008 by

So, I’ve found out about a couple new things from Google I hadn’t known about. (Google is such a prominent player in our space, we need to keep up with what’s going on there so we know how to exploit … Continue reading →

Posted in open access, Practice, programming | 5 Comments

rails debugging

Posted on April 17, 2008 by

I know other rails devs read this blog. I LOVE ruby-prof.  It rocks. You have to use the ‘graph’ profile to really get it’s power, in default mode it doesn’t do much.  I haven’t even tried it yet with KCachegrind … Continue reading →

Posted in Practice, programming | Leave a comment

Rails gotcha — assigning relationships

Posted on April 15, 2008 by

You’ve got Employees and Departments. Each Employee has one Department, each Department has many Employees. Very many.  Let’s say thousands, or even tens of thousands. So you want to create a new Employee and assign it to a Department. dept … Continue reading →

Posted in Practice, programming, Rails | Leave a comment

Can licensing make an API useless?

Posted on April 4, 2008 by

As I discussed in a previous essay, it’s the collaborative power of the internet that makes the open source phenomenon possible. The ability to collaborate cross-institution and develop a ‘community support’ model is what can make this round of library-developed … Continue reading →

Posted in business, open source, programming | 2 Comments

Think you can use Amazon api for library service book covers?

Posted on March 19, 2008 by

Update 19 May 2008: See also Alternatives To Amazon API including prudent planning for if Amazon changes it’s mind. Update: 17 Dec 2008: This old blog post is getting a LOT of traffic, so I thought it important to update … Continue reading →

Posted in business, catalogs, Practice, programming | 12 Comments

Google Book Search API

Posted on March 13, 2008 by

So Google has announced a much-awaited api for pre-checking availability of full text in Google Books. Here is one post with more detail than other announcements I’ve found. I note that the API is described as a javascript api, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Practice, programming | 3 Comments