On Wednesday this week I am launching the Front Matter Gazette , a weekly newsletter that highlights exciting science stories from around the web. The linked content highlighted in the newsletter is published elsewhere and is free to read whenever possible. The newsletter requires a paid subscription (available here), 5 €/month or 50 €/year with a thirty-day free trial and free subscriptions on request.
Science blogs have been around for at least 20 years and have become an important part of science communication. So are there any fundamental issues that need fixing?Barriers to Entry Blogging platforms are mature at this point, and the technology is not imposing barriers to entry for most people.
As I discussed in a recent post, RSS is an essential building block for the upcoming Rogue Scholar Scholarly Blog Archive. RSS makes it easy to import blog posts (both metadata and content) automatically and is supported by all blogging platforms.
The science blog archive that I have started to work on (see previous posts) finally has a name: the Rogue Scholar . I picked this name because I liked the description in the Urban Dictionary.
Another follow-up post, extending three earlier posts (see references), on the Scholarly Blog Archive that Front Matter is building and that I plan to launch in the first half of 2023. I have been thinking about the building blocks that make this blog archive work:Diamond Open Access Using this term sounds strange in the context of scholarly blog posts, but it means that scholarly blog infrastructure should be free to publish and free to read.
In a blog post last week I talked about what I am currently working on, namely a) helping to make it easier (and safer) to run the InvenioRDM digital repository software in Docker container infrastructure, and b) working on converting the bolognese metadata conversion Ruby gem to Python to enhance InvenioRDM functionality.
This blog post is a follow-up to a post in September (Fenner 2022a), where I announced that I had started working on an archive for scholarly blog posts based on the InvenioRDM open-source repository software.
In August 2021 I joined the InvenioRDM project to help develop and host a modern repository platform for scholarly content. Things didn't exactly go as planned at the beginning of 2022, and I spent five months in the hospital with serious personal health issues. Since returning home in early June, my health has improved considerably, and in September I was able to slowly start working again.
Feature images are commonly used for blog posts, including on this blog. We can use our screenshots or photos or stock photos (ideally license free or with an open license) from sites like Flickr, Unsplash, or Pexels. More recently, we can also use artificial intelligence tools such as DALL·E 2 that generate images from a description in natural language.
This blog since earlier this month is no longer using a JAMStack setup but a regular Ghost setup using Ghost Pro for hosting. The primary driver were the new native search and native comments, but I needed to do a little bit of work to keep the DOI registration working.
Since last year this blog is powered by the Ghost open source blogging platform. Two important and long-standing shortcomings of the platform were search and comments, which I added via integrating third-party tools (Typesense and Discourse, respectively). In the last several weeks Ghost team has worked hard to add these features to the core platform, described here and here.