Since Google Summer of Code 2020 I have been contributing code to the new framework of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), a digital repository for metadata, transliterations, images, and other data of cuneiform inscriptions, as well as tools to work with that data. One of the features of the new CDLI framework is improved editing of artifact metadata, as well as inscriptions.

Recently I moved the Citation.js API documentation from /api to /api/0.3, to put the new documentation on /api/0.5. I fixed all the links to the documentation, but I still got a issue request regarding a 404 error after just a few days. All in all, I had to redirect pages from /api/* to /api/0.3/* while all these pages are hosted as static files on GitHub Pages.

Every week since the start of January I heard headlines like “3963 new infections, a bit more than average”. In context, that meant that the amount of positive COVID-19 that day was higher than the average daily amount of cases in the previous seven days. Even though we heard that every week, overall the cases were going down.

Almost two years ago I started participating on the then-new (now-archived) npm forum. I had been using npm for a few years at that point, and I had some free time to spend providing technical support, for fun. I fixed a number of bugs in the CLI, and users thanked me for those. My impact was limited, but the work was fulfilling. That is, until the developers at npm I had been working with got laid off.

BibTeX Rework: Syntax Update A rework of the BibTeX parser has been on the backlog since at least August 15, 2017, and recently I started working on actually carrying it out — systematically.

Debugging the Karmabug For reasons I will not go through right now, I needed a new library for making synchronous HTTP requests in Node.js. I know what you are saying, “But that’s one of the seven deadly sins of JavaScript!” ¹ Well, just know I had my reasons, and I wanted to replace sync-request.

Citation.js: RIS Rework Pt. 2 In the last post I explained how I started implementing the RIS specification that I found in the Internet Archive, only to discover that there is an older specification, which seems to be more common at times. Now, I have implemented the old spec, which luckily was not nearly as complex.

Citation.js: RIS Rework Pt. 1 So a while ago I was looking around for the RIS specification again. I had not found it earlier, only a reference implementation from Zotero, a surprisingly complete list of tags and types on Wikipedia and some examples from various websites and programs exporting RIS files. They did not seem to go together well, however.

Citation.js: Usability Update Citation.js just had a bunch of tooling updated, which should make a lot of use cases easier. Let’s go through them: Replacer (GitHub, Demo) Replacer is an HTML API for Citation.js that I recently updated for the new version so that it works with components.

Citation.js: Wikidata Update The new update, v0.4.4, contains a few Wikidata improvements (commit): 22 new mappings 2 fixed mappings (ISSN did not work and publisher-place was mapped to the wrong thing) 2 improved mappings (container-title for chapters and more URL mappings) 1 removed mapping (genre was inconsistent with the intended use, although it followed the specification) Because most of these mappings require additional resources

Citation.js Version 0.4: The Catch-up After about two years, finally v0.4.0 is ready for a release. Whether it is a real milestone given that there have been prereleases for about two years, while 0.3.x only lasted three weeks, is for you to decide but I am glad that everything I planned for this version is implemented now. Changes So, let’s go through the major changes. Modules Most importantly, the code is fully modulated now.