The Rogue Scholar science blogging archive joined the fediverse in August of last year. This week I want to report on an updated strategy for Rogue Scholar, and what it means for science blogs participating in Rogue Scholar. The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks. To the Fediverse!

On Wednesday DataCite released version 4.5 of the DataCite metadata schema. Today I released updated versions of the commonmeta Ruby and Python libraries that fully support the new schema. You can install them via Rubygems and PyPI, respectively.

Last week I reported a small change to the Rogue Scholar science blog submission form. By asking for the homepage URL of the blog instead of the feed URL, I hope to make it easier for users to register their blog. At the same time, I fixed a bug in the submission form, caused by an issue with the database backend. Unfortunately, that bug fix didn't work as expected.

Yesterday I had to fix a bug in the Rogue Scholar registration form (a software regression that happened over the holidays related to database row level security). This was a reminder that registering a science blog with the Rogue Scholar science blog archive should be quick and painless. Today I made one change that hopefully simplifies registration: Ask for the blog homepage instead of the RSS feed URL.

Last week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive added export of blog post content in various formats (Markdown, ePub, PDF, JATS XML). This week Rogue Scholar is improving the existing metadata export, and adding metadata export in Schema.org JSON-LD format.

On Monday the Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched the export of blog posts in PDF and other formats. Over the last few days I have been busy improving the PDF output, and today I am releasing a new version, available for all the more than 13K science blog posts archived by Rogue Scholar. The PDF is generated using the open source Pandoc universal document converter in combination with the Weasyprint library.

On Monday the Rogue Scholar science blog archive added support for exporting the blog posts in various formats: markdown, ePub, and PDF. Today I am adding another export format: JATS XML, the standard format for scholarly articles. JATS is again automatically generated with the Pandoc universal document converter, with some initial tweaks of the Rogue Scholar metadata.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive starts 2024 with an important release: all blog posts (more than 13,000) are now available for download in Markdown, ePub, and PDF formats. This builds on work completed in December to store the full text of every Rogue Scholar blog post in Markdown format in the Rogue Scholar backend. Combined with the metadata in YAML format, these posts can now be downloaded via the Rogue Scholar API, e.g.

Sometimes we want to preserve a blog post to read or reuse later. There are generic tools for that purpose, including read-it-later apps such as Instapaper or Pocket. For scholarly blog posts, the right place can also be a reference manager, which stores the content and the metadata, especially if a DOI was registered for each blog post. Reference managers can store full-text documents and typically use PDF as the file format.

Writing software is more than writing code – good documentation is one essential aspect. A lot of the tools and libraries that make writing documentation easier use markdown as a file format, combined with metadata in yaml format and optionally some additional functionality, e.g. mdx – which combines markdown with jsx for JSX-based projects such as React.

Shortly following an update earlier this week, the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has updated or added two features today: better documentation and new comments. Documentation The Rogue Scholar documentation site was launched with the service but hasn't seen any updates in several months. Today I updated the platforms page, explaining what blogging platforms are used by the blogs participating in Rogue Scholar and how they are integrated.