Continuous deployment in r-universe A major difference between r-universe and static repositories like CRAN and BioConductor is continuous deployment: packages in r-universe are continuously built in CI and immediately deployed to our package server. This package server stores binaries and metadata in a database, which enables us to dynamically query and expose all the package data through APIs, dashboards, feeds, etc.

Following on from (but unrelated to) my post last week about feed tools we have two posts, one from Deepak Singh, and one from Neil Saunders, both talking about ‘friend feeds’ or ‘lifestreams’. The idea here is of aggregating all the content you are generating (or is being generated about you?) into one place. There are a couple of these about but the main ones seem to be Friendfeed and Profiliac.

If we imagine what the specification for building a scholarly communications system would look like there are some fairly obvious things we would want it to enable. Registration of priority, archival, re-use and replication, and filtering.

We all know chemical space; Chemical blogspace (Cb) is different: it is the chemistry discussed in blogspace. Cb is build on the opensource software of Postgenomic.com which I bloged on before. The now running Cb aggregates 19 blogs and, like the original, extracts linked (cited or reviewed) articles from literature. The system is beta, but I am happy about it already that I mention it now.

I hacked in a new extension point for Bioclipse yesterday, based on a proposal I made earlier. The new extension point (EP) is called ChildResourceCreator and allows creating child resources for a given IBioResource. One application where this is very useful is the CMLRSS application (earlier blog), or any RSS or Atom enriched with any other XML language.

After requests I added yesterday more visible the RSS and Atom feeds for the Planet Blue Obelisk. They are linked in the menu on the right, and as alternative links to the document. These should show up in most recent webbrowsers as feed icon in the lower right corner of the browser window. It is often an orange icon. I also added a ‘Leave a comment’ link to encourage people to leave comments on items.

Today I setup a blog planet for Blue Obelisk members. First I tried Chumpologica but it did not read Atom feeds. Next in line was Planet , which turned out to be used by many big planet sites, like Planet Debian . It also works with Atom feeds in general, but not well with Atom 1.0 feeds, like that of Carsten. After some googling I found a patched version which did the job.