Sometimes we want to preserve a blog post to read or reuse later. There are generic tools for that purpose, including read-it-later apps such as Instapaper or Pocket. For scholarly blog posts, the right place can also be a reference manager, which stores the content and the metadata, especially if a DOI was registered for each blog post. Reference managers can store full-text documents and typically use PDF as the file format.
Writing software is more than writing code – good documentation is one essential aspect. A lot of the tools and libraries that make writing documentation easier use markdown as a file format, combined with metadata in yaml format and optionally some additional functionality, e.g. mdx – which combines markdown with jsx for JSX-based projects such as React.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched two new features today: GUIDs (globally unique identifiers) and support for OECD Fields of Science and Technology. Globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) GUIDs are used to globally identify a blog post and are part of the RSS, Atom, and JSON Feed specifications.
The dedicated API for the Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched two weeks ago. The initial release supported fetching metadata and content from Rogue Scholar. Today this API was updated with important new functionality: parsing of science blog posts and storing the metadata and content in the Rogue Scholar.
On Monday the Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched a dedicated API. Today I am reporting on the first Jupyter notebook using that API to generate an overlay blog post. An overlay blog post applies the idea of an overlay journal to science blog posts, and the Rogue Scholar API – in combination with content that has an open license (CC-BY) – makes that easy.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has launched a dedicated API today, publicly available at https://api.rogue-scholar.org and complementing the website. Rogue Scholar had an API before but with two important limitations.
Newsletters have been around forever, but their popularity has significantly increased in the past few years, also thanks to platforms such as Ghost, Medium, and Substack. Which of course also includes science newsletters.Failure of advertising as a revenue model The most important driver of this trend is probably the realization that advertising is a poor revenue model for content published on the web, including blogs.
Metadata are an important feature of every scholarly resource. For science blog posts – which are published with far fewer resources than for example journal articles or books – there is an additional requirement: make the metadata collection as painless as possible.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive adds important functionality to existing science blogs, namely archiving, full-text search, and DOI registration. While a lot of effort has gone into making Rogue Scholar as affordable as possible by using Open Source software, automation, and involving the community, it still costs money to build and run scholarly infrastructure, including scholarly infrastructure for science blogs.
In January I started the Rogue Scholar blog archive with the slogan "science blogging on steroids", promising to enhance science blogs in important ways. Earlier this month I began DOI registrations for blog posts, and I am well on track to complete this for the included 35 blogs with more than 1,000 blog posts in the next few weeks.