Category Archives: JURN tips and tricks

How to download a large page image from an Issuu magazine

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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How to download a large page image from an Issuu magazine:

1. Load the Issuu magazine.

2. Right click on the first page. “View Source”.

3. Near the top of the source code, look in the meta for link rel="image_src" href="http://image.issuu.com/[really-really-long-number---]/jpg/page_1.jpg"

4. Copy that image URL, and simply change page_1.jpg to page_18.jpg or whatever page you want to get.

Note that the page numbering between the Issuu magazine’s display and the original PDF may be astray by a few pages, and a little re-calibration may be needed. Note also that you’re getting images of the entire page, not hi-res copies of the images used in the page.

But these days all this is probably not needed. Screen-capture software is perfectly capable of capturing a scrolling screen.

How to access your Amazon Listmania lists

04 Thursday Jun 2015

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Amazon.com is making it almost impossible for user of its Listmania service (create themed lists of selected books, eg: best books on the history of Tomorrowland) to access their old lists from their personal Amazon profile. Here’s how to see a list of your lists…

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/byauthor/ADD-YOUR-ID-NUMBER-HERE?ref_=cm_aya_bb_lists&pldnSite=1

Replace ADD-YOUR-ID-NUMBER-HERE with the number that shows up in the URL when you view your personal profile.

Probably best copied out to a new WordPress.com blog, if you want to keep them and make them more public.

How to un-dumb WordPress.com blog posting

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

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In a WordPress.com blog, you can now use a Greasemonkey script to get you past the dumb and childish “Beep Beep Boop” method of posting to your blog. Seems to work fine in the Firefox browser, as starting a new blog post takes me to the full-featured Classic editor. Why is this script needed?…

“on March 13, 2015, the preference setting for the choice of [WordPress.com blog] editor, which was implemented by a cookie through a link back to the classic editor, was removed.”

Not loving Notey

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

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Notey is a new topic-focused blog finding directory. Yeah, I know… but it just reportedly raised $1.6 million in funding.

It has a slick iPad-focussed design, so on a widescreen desktop PC I hit some clunky navigation points a few times. Top of the ‘recent blog posts’ pile on entering was “40+ Insanely Clever Products Your Dog Deserves To Own”, which suggests the marketeers are already in Notey, via marketeering blog-a-zine articles.

notey

The search box is hidden away, as if they’re ashamed of it. The search experience is not great. I searched for “Lovecraft” (H.P. Lovecraft, famous horror and SF author, on whose life I’m an expert) and the results were incredibly poor. A Google search for…

site:http://www.notey.com/blogs/ lovecraft

… reveals more of the semantic messiness, and the ways that the database is being skewed by the vast cloud of fanboy crapware that now surrounds the man and his fiction.

Sadly Notey doesn’t look like the new Technorati to me, and nor is it of much used to academics seeking a specialist single-topic blog. For discovery of single-topic blogs Google is still your friend, and the following Google Search modifier still works despite Google having abandoned a dedicated blog search box…

inblogtitle:keyword

Update: October 2018. It appears that inblogtitle:keyword is no longer useful, as it now returns only 10 irrelevant results when used with Lovecraft.

Adblocking in 2015

08 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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It’s 2015 and it seems there are still some people moaning about seeing adverts in search and online generally. They obviously still haven’t heard about the free automatic advert blockers available for Web browsers. If you know one of those people, simply get them to install the following the ‘core four’ browser add-ons:

Adblock Plus
Adblock Plus Pop-up Addon
Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus
F.B. Purity – Clean up and Customize Facebook

Unfortunately there’s still nothing that can routinely and automatically block the stupid “sign up to our newsletter!” / “take our survey!” screen-dimmers.

It takes an Aeon…

24 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, New media journal articles, Spotted in the news

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Aeon magazine has a very nice new Save to Instapaper drop-down on its articles, which might usefully be copied by ejournals offering articles in HTML.

saveinsta

Compare the blissful ease of doing this with the impossibility of saving Digital Arts magazine’s new 2015 creative trends survey article to Instapaper. Impossible because of the database-driven URL structure, which loathsomely uses ? in the URL to spawn a new page hanging off of a static URL. I ended up having to copy-paste to a .txt file and then used Amazon’s Send to Kindle desktop software. I guess Digital Arts are assuming their younger clear-eyed readers are going straight to the page on an iPad, rather than needing the ‘old-eyes friendly’ font-scaling on a Kindle.

No mention of this Aeon button on the Instapaper official blog in 2014, so I’m guessing it’s custom to the editors, probably wrapped up in a WordPress widget or similar. But their little button looks like it can be fairly easily implemented in a DIV in your HTML code…

readlatercode

EZB tweaks remove date-range

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

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The EZB has evidently had a slight re-design. They’ve removed the ability to set a date-limit on the “List of new EZB journals”. However, the date is still being set in plaintext in the URL itself. Users can dial back the date range by typing a new date at the end of the URL, and then reloading. The dialogue to set a date-range on the page itself has been removed, as has the ability to filter by partly OA titles (now the options are just ‘freely available’ or ‘not accessible’).

http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/searchres.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=1&lang=en&jq_type1=ID&jq_term1=01.12.2014

Three-column static search results in Firefox

16 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

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This post is for those who’ve recently lost the capability to have their Google Search results look like this in Firefox and a widescreen PC monitor…

googlemonkeyr

Greasemonkey and GoogleMonkeyR are required to do this. They are still working fine together for me, with a few new versions installed…

1. Update Greasemonkey to 2.3 (29th Oct 2014) and GoogleMonkeyR to 1.7.2.

2. Access Google Search via the following URL, which has a parameter that limits search results to 15 per page…

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=0&tbo=1&num=15&tbs=li:1

15 results fit nicely into three columns, the three columns being set up in GoogleMonkeyR Preferences (which is the cog-wheel that appears top-right, once you make a Google search).

3. Hide Google’s “Searches related to …” element on the Google Search results page. You can do this easily in GoogleMonkeyR Preferences. This div needs to be hidden, because otherwise it sits awkwardly between you and the numbered links that lead to the subsequent results pages.

If that doesn’t work for you, then you can do Step 3 with the popular AdBlock Plus add-on (right-click on “”Searches related to …””, ‘Inspect Element’, highlight whole ‘extrares’ element, click on red AdblockPlus icon, and block it on Google.com). Once you’ve learned how to hide page elements like this with AdBlock Plus you can use it on other sites, for instance hiding the sports section or the tacky video sidebars on newspaper websites.