Zotero, Web APIs, and data formats

I’ve been doing some work recently (for a couple of different clients) with Zotero, the popular reference management software. I’ve always been a big fan of the product. It has a number of great features, including the fact that it integrates with users’ browsers, and can read metadata out of web pages, PDF files, linked data, and a whole bunch of APIs.

zotero

One especially nice feature of Zotero is that you can use it to collaborate with a group of people on a shared library of data which is stored in the cloud and synchronized to the devices of the group members.
Continue reading Zotero, Web APIs, and data formats

Old News for Twitter

Yesterday I finished a little development project to build a TwitterBot for New Zealand’s online newspaper archive Papers Past.

What’s a “TwitterBot”? It’s a software application that autonomously (robotically, hence “-bot”) sends tweets. There are a lot of TwitterBots tweeting about all kinds of things. Tim Sherratt has produced a few, including one called @TroveNewsBot which tweets links to articles from the Australian online newspaper archive of Trove, and this was a direct inspiration for my TwitterBot. Recently Hugh Rundle produced a TwitterBot called Aus GLAM Blog Bot that tweets links to blog posts by people blogging in the Australian GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector. People like me. I’m looking forward to seeing Hugh’s bot tweeting about my bot. Continue reading Old News for Twitter

Beta release of XProc-Z web server framework

I have at last released a “final” version of my web server framework, XProc-Z, for testing. The last features I had wanted to include were:

  • The ability for the XProc code in the web server to read information from its environment, so that a generic XProc pipeline can be customized by setting configuration properties.
  • Full support for sending and receiving binary files (i.e. non text files). XProc is really a language for processing XML, but I think it will be handy to be able to deal with binary files as well from time to time.
  • A few sample XProc pipelines, to demonstrate the capability of the platform.

XProc-Z-samples Continue reading Beta release of XProc-Z web server framework