Local backup for your Reddit comments

A new free UserScript for your Web browser, “Quick access buttons for Reddit saved posts and messages”. Has a one-click button to download all your own Reddit comments, as a searchable .TXT file or .CSV file. So far as I know, Reddit has no ability to do this in their own UI. Tested and working. I instantly got a .TXT file with all my comments, each under the thread title and date-stamped.

Personal RSS feed from bookmarked Web articles

When at a Web page… click to send the URL to a script… the script parses the full-text page into a junk-cleaned Readability format… then passes that cleaned Web page into your personal RSS feed of articles.

This is now done by Tobias Franke, as a standalone .php script and a bookmarklet. There are a couple of caveats. You have to have paid-for hosted web-space, and space that won’t throw a fit over a new .php file. Also it relies on FiveFilters to do RSS extraction, so is not private. However, the maker shows how to use Composer to do the same locally.

See also: rsstodolist, but there your custom feed is publicly accessible to anyone who knows the address.

On national learned societies in SSH

New in open access, the article “Beyond borders: Examining the role of national learned societies in the social sciences and humanities”. Actually, not proper open access, as it appears you need to “log in” to Wiley to download or print (neither works for me without a log in). Thankfully Google Scholar is on the case, and having none of that nonsense — searching for the title there gets you a download link. The article is based on a spring 2020 survey of 194 learned societies in the UK and Europe. One finding is that…

Contrary to previous research, most SSH societies in our study have not undergone significant changes in the past 5 years, challenging expectations of their declining role.