10 Tuesday Jan 2017
Posted in My general observations
Visit Britain provides nearly 15,000 selected copyright-free images, with a search box. The selection is obviously highly curated and high-quality, and no registration is required to download. If you have a pop-up blocker, you’ll need to whitelist media.visitbritain.com to get at the hi-res magazine-quality image download link. There are a few noticeable gaps in coverage, such as the major ceramics tourism hub which is the city of Stoke-on-Trent (one picture, on a search for “Stoke-on-Trent”).
08 Sunday Jan 2017
Posted in My general observations
Checked for link-rot and updated if needed: openECO: list of 700 ecology/nature titles indexed in JURN.
30 Friday Dec 2016
Posted in My general observations
The tyranny of “relevance” sorting is rather wearing. Why is “relevance” the unchangeable default for various forms of search result? Because they’re so very rarely “relevant” (Google Search aside) and more often than not I’m looking for a “by date” ordering. I’ve been to the site before, and now I just want to see what’s new. If there’s one innovation I’d like to see in 2017 it’s a robust browser add-on, one which can be taught to identify the site’s relevance/date toggle and then auto-switches to “by date”.
15 Thursday Dec 2016
Posted in My general observations
JURN’s annual full link-check + repair is now complete. The checking of the indexed URLs is normally done August/September, so this year it has been running a few months late. Mostly because it took a few months, on and off. URL presence on Google Search is checked to the indexed path at http://www.site.com/journal/articles/pdfs/.. etc and not to http://www.site.com/ etc.
This checking is in addition to the weekly linkbot-enabled checking of the homepage URLs in the Directory.
03 Saturday Dec 2016
Posted in My general observations
17 Thursday Nov 2016
Posted in My general observations
A quick survey of some of the better free Photoshop book-cover mock-ups. Mock-ups are where you drop in the hi-res cover graphic for your own book, replacing the one in the graphic. All below were being offered without weird ‘installers’, ‘premium’ download accounts, mailing-list pop-ups or other tom-foolery, and they un-zipped fine.
Hardback Book Mockup, which looks suitable for the ‘easy-reading for hipsters’ sort of books.
Hardcover Book PSD Mockup, a chunky classic manual / textbook type of book. The download has a simple five-second timer-delay but works.
Free Book Mockup .PSD. A straightforward large tome, perhaps suitable for an encyclopaedia volume.
Propped Up 6 x 9 Paperback. The levitation effect looks a little odd, but could suit a title on the future of technology or similar.
9 x 7 Landscape Paperback Book Mockup. Could work nicely for a small Blurb print-on-demand photobook.
Photorealistic Book Mockup. Could suit a small volume of translation or poetry, although getting print-on-demand binding that looks as finely tooled as that might be a problem. 15 second download timer-delay, but it does download.
5 x 8 Mass Market Paperback, but with a little scaling on the background (to make it look larger) it might also be used for the cheap paperback of your 800-page academic brain-crusher.
6 x 9 Boxset with Small Spine and 6 x 9 Book Series Template both have a look suitable for slim 150-page local history book as a Lulu 6″ x 9″ print-on-demand paperback.
27 Thursday Oct 2016
Posted in JURN blogged, My general observations
My thanks to Klaus Graf. For a German-language blog post complaining about the lack of interest in making a good OA search engine, he has obtained and shown a screenshot of two results from OAFindr (by 1science aka One Science) for mongolian folk song. These keywords were used for my December 2015 group-test of OA search engines.
Neither of the two OAFindr results is in JURN, because they both come from a title published by the Canadian Center of Science and Education, a publisher which has long been on Beall’s List.
Update, Nov 2017: OAFindr is now called 1Findr.
26 Wednesday Oct 2016
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, My general observations
The owners of www.scoop.it have trapped all their free users. The service no longer offers any RSS feed, from mid August 2016. I’ve only just noticed, as I use RSS to bring posts into a blog and home page. Now you have to use their own “Integration” embedding, use of which requires a paid upgrade to a Business Account. Nor is there now any option to export or backup your Scoop.it blog, for which you would now need to use a third-party website ripper like HTTrack.
How to get around this bastardy…
Option 1. Really easy.
Go to the free Fivefilters Feed Creator, to solve the RSS part of the problem.
Add the root URL of your blog at Scoop.it. For instance, http://www.scoop.it/t/my-scoop-it-blog/ Below it in “look for links” type h2 which is the headline tag where Scoop.it puts its post titles within the Web page. Click Preview.
This will give you a basic free 10-item scraped post-listing as a viable RSS feed, suitable for embedding in the sidebar widget of a blog or on a home page. You can also use this to replace any defunct Scoop.it feeds in your RSS Feedreader.
For a small fee you can also buy the Fivefilters script and host it on your own server.
Option 2. Incredibly complicated.
Use Feed43, to solve the RSS part of the problem. This is similar to Fivefilters and also free, but the setup definitely needs an experienced coder to get the feed working. I’m guessing that there are more advanced options than Fivefilters under the hood, though?
Option 3. Nuke Scoop.it, and go to WordPress instead.
Use a free third-party website ripper like HTTrack to backup your Scoop.it, open a WordPress.com account and in a departing post on your Scoop.it tell your subscribers that you are now blogging elsewhere. Possibly there are WordPress templates out there, and/or browser add-ons, that make WordPress work like Scoop.it?
04 Tuesday Oct 2016
Posted in My general observations
LifeTurner: a streamlined online service to help a scholarly author to put all their papers and published works in order, to upload them in a suitable format, and then to store them ‘a digital vault’ ready to be released to the world as Open Access on their death. The service could also help to ‘buy back’ rights to the author’s formerly commercial works, also negotiate any picture rights involved. Then the catalogue would be presented as beautifully formatted website alongside an authorised biography, and endowed in order to stay online forever. As far as I know, such a personal service doesn’t yet exist.
15 Thursday Sep 2016
Posted in My general observations
I’m fairly good as an online picture researcher, but lately… ugh. Open Web picture research on certain historical topics is rapidly becoming nearly impossible, because search results get saturated by the websites of swivel-eyed loons and vast commercial robo-stores. I’d suggest we need some kind of Web browser filter to rid search results of “conspiracy theory crazies” and “commercial stores”, at least. Even a filter that just flags ‘known Photoshop fakes’ would be great, perhaps via some kind of pattern recognition.