In recent days my server has become prey to ever-more brute-force attacks against Wordpress instances. This is a total pain, although they're unlikely (touch wood) to succeed given the complexity of the passwords I tend to deploy and non-standard account names. That said, I got tired of this and wanted to figure out how to block them. The biggest problem I encountered is that some of these password-guessing attacks were coming from a botnet.

First of all, let me say that I found the piece of work I'm about to discuss really interesting in its own right. I know one of the co-authors and I'm an avid Soundcloud user (for electronic music, no-less!) so I thought this would be right up my street.

In a recent [piece for The Bookseller](http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/anthony-cond-309360), Anthony Cond (for whom I have a huge deal of respect), writes approvingly, if cautiously, of the births of new university presses. Indeed, there is much to celebrate in the idea of the university taking back the means of its research production on a not-for-profit basis. I am wholly in support of such a mission.

Sigh. More hacking attempts and seems someone did manage to inject a php eval attack into one of my Wordpress installs.

Everyone, when they are writing, can find themselves falling into bad habits. This is because, as my friend Liz Sage pointed out to me, when you are writing, you're trying to express thought. It's a writerly activity for you, the author, not thinking wholly of the reader. Examples of things that I do include repeating the same word in a sentence and using split infinitives.

Over the past week I've done some of the initial development work on [CaSSius](https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/CaSSius), the portion of the typesetter for the [Open Library of Humanities](https://www.openlibhums.org) that produces PDF output. The idea here is that, as a publisher, you want to produce one document and then create HTML and PDF from that single source. CaSSius provides two ways to achieve this.

 Announcing [CaSSius](https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/CaSSius): a tool to create beautiful paginated PDF documents from HTML content using CSS regions. It is intended to be part of [XML-first/XML-in workflows](https://www.martineve.com/2015/07/20/building-a-real-xml-first-workflow-for-scholarly-typesetting/) for scholarly communications but may have alternative uses.

For some time now, I've worked to build an open-source JATS XML typesetter. It's called [meTypeset](https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/meTypeset). It's not by any means perfect and the approach it takes is unlikely to ever yield 100% good markup from Word input.

In the past couple of weeks I've had a number of emails about the styleguide for the [Open Library of Humanities](https://www.openlibhums.org). Queries range from "my discipline does things differently, is that OK?" to "why bother maintaining your own style guide, why not just refer to a named style like Chicago?" Both good points. My own thinking actually goes further, though.

The following is the slightly revised text of my keynote at the _Action Writing: The Politics of US Literature, 1960-Present_, held at Birkbeck College, University of London on the 3rd July 2015, organized by Catherine Flay and Pippa Eldridge.

If you think carefully about research publication and its economics, a strange (but also obvious) point becomes clear. In university ecosystems where we have tuition fees (and probably in those without) we determine how much material can be published through the frame of reference of teaching. This can be seen if you accept that research in the academy serves the dual function of dissemination _and_ assessment.