Aus GLAMR

I’m thinking of starting an occasional blog series on (until I find a better name) ‘How an ex-programmer keeps introducing automation and programming into my non-programming job’. Yesterday I was compiling meeting and occupancy calendars for 2025 and instead of copying dates from an empty 2025 calendar and from the state government’s public holiday calendar, I dusted off my Python date and calendar library (which I had built for generating janky lists of recurring dates) and started exploring the icalendar package to generate my own ical files. ...

I have updated the book shortcode1 used on my Reading page to link to the Internet Archive’s Open Library, which provides crowd-sourced book metadata – you can also look for these books in your local library! I’ve used the Open Library identifier for a Work rather than a specific edition. I used the Open Library API to take the ISBN of a specific (physical or digital) book and return the Work ID; publishing and documenting that code might have to wait for another day. ...

I say I’m an archivist but I’ve been rather blasé about archiving my own web presence. I can’t find an archive of my GeoCities site and the Wayback Machine only has a single capture from my university undergraduate page (I had already graduated a couple of years before that). But I started collecting my own domains around the early 2000s and the Wayback Machine is a reminder of the many iterations of my personal website,1 the different hand-coded templates, CMSes, and static site generators that I used, and all the text that I published and abandoned over the years. ...

I’ve broken out of my lockdown-era reading slump (a topic for another blog post) and wanted to return to tracking and sharing my reading online (tracking and sharing my reading is one of the reasons I went back to library school in the first place). I have accounts on both LibraryThing and Goodreads and used to find good recommendations on both sites, but Amazon bought Goodreads and LibraryThing, while still independent and nerd-friendly, is after all another silo where I am not in full control of the data I submit. ...

Oh hi, it’s been a while. ...