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Year: 2013

New blog front- and back-end

A while back, Dreamhost had some problems and my blog and assorted other websites I help keep track of went down. For more than two weeks. Now, I understand that crap happens. And I understand that sometimes lots of things happen at once. But fundamentally, their infrastructure is such that they could lose everything on a machine and be unable to get it back for more than two weeks. I’m not a mathematician, but that’s not “five-nine” service. So, I decided to start hunting around for another provider. And then I got distracted by the idea that maybe having my…

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Announcing “traject” indexing software

[Over the next few days I’ll be writing a series of posts that highlight a new indexing solution by Jonathan Rochkind and myself called traject that we’re using to index MARC data into Solr. This is the introduction.] Wow. Six months since I posted here. What have I been doing? Well, mostly parenting, but in the last few weeks I was lucky enough to get on board with a project started by Jonathan Rochkind for a new JRuby-based tool optimized for indexing MARC data into solr. You know, kinda like solrmarc, but JRuby. What’s it look like? I encourage you…

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Come work at the University of Michigan

The Library has three UX positions available right now — interface designer, interface developer, and a web content strategist. Come join me at what is easily the best place I’ve ever worked! Full details are over at Suz’s blog.

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Please: don’t return your books

So, I’m at code4lib 2013 right now, where side conversations and informal exchanges tend to be the most interesting part. Last night I had an conversation with the inimitable Michael B. Klein, and after complaining about faculty members that keep books out for decades at a time, we ended up asking a simple question: How much more shelving would we need if everyone returned their books? Assuming we could get them all checked in and such, well, where would we put them? I’m looking at this in the simplest, most conservative way possible: Assume they’re all paperbacks, so we don’t…

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