Since 2009 I've been running a service that takes posts to the EvolDir mailing list and sends them to a Twitter stream at @EvolDir. This service was running on a local machine which has died. Rather than wait until I rebuild that server (again), I looked around for other ways to recreate this service. I decided to use IFTTT ("if this then that"), which is a wonderful way to chain together web services.

Quick, poorly thought out idea. I've argued before that Mendeley seems the obvious tool to build a "bibliography of life." It has pretty much all the features we need: nice editing tools, support for DOIs, PubMed identifiers, social networking, etc. But there's one thing it lacks. There's not an easy way to transmit updates from Mendeley to another database.

Yesterday I posted notes on Web Hooks and OpenURL. That post was written when I was already late (you know, when you say to yourself "yeah, I've got time, it'll just take 5 minutes to finish this..."). The Web Hooks + OpenURL project is still very much a work in progress, but I thought a screen cast would help explain why I think this is going to make my life a lot easier.

For me one of the most frustrating things about online databases is that they often can't be edited. For example, I've recently created a version of the Australian Faunal Directory on CouchDB, which contains a list of all animals in Australia, and a fairly comprehensive bibliography of taxonomic publication on those animals. What I'd like to do is locate those publications online.