23 Saturday May 2009
Posted in My general observations
I’ve just finished and published a fourth issue of JURN’s own ‘overlay journal’. The new issue is themed “Borderline fantastic — maps and the imagination”, and all texts are freely available online.
15 Wednesday Apr 2009
Posted in My general observations
JURN is now out of beta, having added over 1,300 titles since launch two months ago.
10 Tuesday Feb 2009
Posted in My general observations
Jurn.org is now showing up in the main Google index.
07 Saturday Feb 2009
Posted in My general observations
JURN is now at https://jurn.link/ — and simply typing jurn.org in your web browser will also get you there.
06 Friday Feb 2009
Posted in My general observations
As of four hours ago, JURN is now showing up on the main Google search results.
05 Thursday Feb 2009
Posted in Academic search, JURN metrics, My general observations
I’m trying to fix a problem with JURN returning 
into the search box after a search, when it should show 
.
being the “raw” HTML codes for those Chinese characters.
Tweaking the supplied code snippet from UTF-8 to iso-8859-1 seems to cure it. But then that results in nothing being returned to the search box at all, even for English queries. Which is obviously a non-starter, since I’m not going to cripple JURN in English.
It seems the bug results from a combination of Google’s remote “show_afs_search.js” javascript file (which I can’t change), and my showing the results on the same page as the search box (i.e.: the “iframe hosting option”). The language encoding for the search terms is getting stripped out, somewhere in the loop back to the search-box.
Other people’s Custom Search Engines seem to handle the problem, but only by displaying the results on a new second page. I may have to look into having a second interface for non-English users, showing the results on a second page, when JURN makes the move to its own domain. Or you can just use the “raw” Google page for JURN.
Unless someone can offer a solution? But I’ve searched the support forums with no result. It seems it may well be a genuine bug with the “iframe hosting option”. The same bug also causes JURN to refuse non-English accents (i.e.: diacritics) on search terms. So “pate” will work and will find “pate” and “pâté”, — but “pâté” on its own won’t be accepted as a valid search term.
05 Thursday Feb 2009
Posted in My general observations
I just purchased/registered a suitable domain name for JURN, as I don’t want (potentially rather heavy) traffic bogging down my personal blog space. Hopefully it’ll be live by Friday or maybe Monday. I’ll put an auto re-direct on the old page.
04 Wednesday Feb 2009
Posted in My general observations
I wanted something memorable, with just a few letters, and that was available as a domain-name on the .org top-level domain.
JOUR sounded too French.
JURN is a common German / Scandanavian boys’ name, no-one else was using it for anything remotely like a search-engine or even a trademark, and I had some new artwork to hand featuring a boy to be the “brand mascot”.
I pictured “Jurn” as some student stuck in the wilds of somewhere like Finland, without paid access to many commercial ejournals. He’d be trying to plough through Google Scholar in English, and getting tangled up in results that constantly demanded payment. JURN is the search engine for that student, and for millions like him around the world who have limited or no access to full-text journal databases.
So… that’s why the new search-engine was named JURN. But as an acronym, what might it stand for? Well, you can pick your own meaning, in the style of the old sci-fi zines — Journal Usury Recovery Net? Jolly Urbane Reading Node?
03 Tuesday Feb 2009
Posted in My general observations
The alpha version of the new academic search-engine JURN is now live, indexing 951 web URLs covering ejournals, mostly free and full-text, in the arts and humanities.
The front-page weighs in at just 9kb, so hopefully the bandwidth usage won’t be too heavy.