Category: Technology

Creating a Twitter Search, Hashtag, User, Favorites or List RSS Feed

[Update August 20, 2014] – I’ve not actually tried this, but found a new article on How to Create RSS Feeds in Twitter using Google Script.

[Update March 4, 2013] – As of March 5th, 2013, twitter will no longer support unauthenticated feeds of any kind and will be dropping support for RSS altogether (meaning you can only get JSON feeds). Therefore, you will need to make your own (see comments for one suggestion) or use an app to follow specific feeds. Continue reading “Creating a Twitter Search, Hashtag, User, Favorites or List RSS Feed”

Find & Fix Missing Category in WordPress (.com)

Seems like after the upgrade, a number of people have had the problem with randomly missing categories from the admin panel/dashboard. One of mine randomly disappeared after I renamed it. It was no longer a subcategory and was at the bottom of the list (not alphabetical order) on all the filters etc., but refused to show up in the Categories admin panel.

So, I found lots of information on how to fix missing categories for wordpress, but not when you use wordpress.com. After much searching, I found one solution on wordpress.com forums (second last reply), but what’s missing is the key element on how to figure out your category ID. Easiest way then:

Find your category ID by looking at the source code for your blog. You will see for example, <li class=”cat-item cat-item-78954″>. The number is your category ID. Similar thing for tags.

You must have categories (or tags) displayed on your blog for this to work obviously.

A Brief Look at Summon

Summon is Serials Solutions’ web scale discovery tool. I think so far, it looks pretty good. It has all the things you’d want these days in your searches including:

  • sidebar with different options to refine search
  • clean, easy to use interface
  • save citations to folder and export
  • advance search, including ISBN for books

Currently, all records in the catalogue, institutional repository, and journal articles have been included.  There’s also a locations refinement category to refine to a specific branch for catalogue materials.

It’ll be interesting to see what our users (including staff) think.

Quick Edit/Add-on: Seems like the major criticism I’ve heard is that it does not do known-item (that is you know what you’re looking for) searches well, but as my supervisor has explained, that’s not the purpose of a discovery tool. If you want to looking for something you know in a library, you use the source that will help you look for that. Some people might say “but look at google, it can do both well”, but even google scholar is unlikely to give you a book if you only enter a couple of words when you’re looking for a book (obviously that’s not true in all cases).

PDF Batch Automation (PDF to Image and PDF Merge)

EDIT: I’ve been reminded/informed that this only works in Windows (or MS-DOS anyway) since it uses .bat files. The suggestion if you’re using other OSs is to use php (but really you can use anything) to automate the command.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with Adobe Acrobat (even if they haven’t actually used it).  It’s a nice GUI if you want to edit PDFs, but at least as far as I know, it does not do any batch or automation work.  For a digital images project, there’s a lot of automation work that needs to be done and for image to image conversion, I was using Photoshop, but then I started dealing with PDFs. Thus, it was only natural to turn to GhostScript.

PDF to Image
So, I don’t really get any credit for this, because it’s already out there and the variables are well explained.  So if you want to turn all the pages of your PDF into images, check out this Danzels Internets post. My case was a little different because I only wanted the first page turned into an image as a thumbnail for an entire file and then for an entire folder. I also prefer to do any image modification (even batch) in an image program.

@echo off
FOR %%Z IN (*.pdf) DO gswin32 -sDEVICE=jpeg -dJPEGQ=95 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dDOINTERPOLATE -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -sOUTPUTFILE=%%Z.jpg -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE %%Z

So, here the major changes are “gswin32” because I use the Windows version, and the “-dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1” so that the first and last page it processes is page 1. You can change the output file name too, so I changed it in such a way that it takes the original file name and adds the .jpg extension.

PDF Merge
This is kind of a side note, because I didn’t need this for my project, but I recently downloaded some articles that for some reason had each section in a separate PDF.  So, I get no credit for this one either as I got this one from Real’s How-to on Merging PDFs. I put this in here only for possible improvements of what’s presented on that site.

For the merging of PDFs in a directory, for the [merge.bat], you’re supposed to have this code:

@echo off
gswin32 -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=merged.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf
FOR %%Z IN (*.pdf) DO IF NOT %%Z==1.pdf IF NOT %%Z==merged.pdf IF NOT %%Z==merged2.pdf call merge2.bat %%Z

Maybe it’s clear to other people, but the “1.pdf” is the name of the first pdf. I found that the subsequent ones will be added in alphanumeric order.  Also, if you happen not to change the code, it will throw an error and insert a blank page at the beginning.

Evergreen 2.0!

I don’t normally post news items, but I was really excited to hear about the new version of evergreen (here’s the list of new features).  I have been taking a library automation course, so I have been learning more about ILS, particularly OpenSource (OS) ones.  I didn’t know how many OS systems were available, so I was interested in reading and hearing more. I was a bit disappointed when I heard there was no OS ILS suitable for large libraries, but even if the new version of Evergreen doesn’t quite meet those needs, I’m happy to hear that it’s moving in that direction.