Subscribers please read!
There are some changes in the site that I long want to do. And I am going to.
I’m going to send a couple of messages: one just before works happen (this post you’re reading) and another one (entitled Site maintenance (and II)) that you’re supposed to be reading right after this one. They’ll both be published almost at the same time, so expect them to appear on your feeds reader almost together.
In case they don’t, make sure you’re subscribed to one (or more ;) of the following feeds:
Thanks for patience. And thanks for reading.
Just a year ago I posted about my PhD dissertation (last step towards the thesis) and uploaded it here:
with abstract and full text in a 1.1 Mb PDF licencesed under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd license. Yesterday the paper reached 6,000 downloads. Besides the paper, I have now 22 more references including all kind of articles and presentations, sometimes full text, sometimes the presentations, sometimes just the reference. Indeed, there are about 200 pages in the Wiki, more than 600 entries (authors and works) in the ICT4D Bibliography and 4 full text online educational resources at the ICT4D Courses repository. The blog has almost 400 total entries (including pages) and somewhere in the past it became a review with its own real ISSN: 1886-5208.
In October that’ll be 3 years with the site, that has become a real personal research portal, quite far in concept from the original blog. Next steps should be entering a new stage in the publication of the review, setting a board of editors, concrete fields of work, etc. Homework for my holidays. Any ideas will be welcome.
No one has noticed but ICTlogy has been running on WordPress 2.0 since… some posts ago.
- Upgrade is easy. The WP Themes thing was such a good idea.
- New admin is much better, a good improvement. Admin’s home page is great with lots of shortcuts and the preview feature is really cool.
- The rich editor does weird things with relative links. I switched it off.
- Akismet does not seem to be working, but WordPress Hashcash 2.3 does (this doesn’t apply for WordPress Hashcash 3.0 beta, that just don’t allow to post any comments at all – maybe my fault, don’t know…). Comment spam will someday cause mortal casualties near the Tannhauser gate.
- Login page has some bug not remembering you when you come back. The solution is
switching the link from /wp-login.php (the file) to /wp-admin/ (the directory)
.
When I prepared my master’s dissertation, I — just as much people — happen to gather quite a good bunch of bibliographic resources: why not share them?
ICT4D Bibliography is my collection of books, articles, reviews, journals, institutions, authors, etc. in the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development and other related subjects such as e-learning, knowledge management, free/libre open source software, online volunteering, nonprofits, etc.
The resources are filed under two main subjects: projects (the titles of the books, articles, reviews, etc.) and contacts (people and institutions that are related to the projects). A second filing method is categories (i.e. subject), type of author (author, editor…), type of project (article, blog…), language (in which the project is written) and country (of the contact).
You’ll see this is no formal way of categorizing at all but my way. Feel free to suggest improvements.
Powered with BibCiter
When I started with this bibliography I really needed a database and really needed I could use it not connected to the Internet. Another thing I was interested in having in my references database was that it created a bibliography — yes, that part at the end of a paper so tough to write. I found it easier and quicker to program it myself and the result was BibCiter, being the most interesting part of BibCiter — for me ;) — that it generates automatically the “correct” bibliographical citation according to the APA standards. The workflow is the following:
You log in as administrator and maintain a list of contacts and projects. The admin site does hold more information than the one that is open to the unlogged visitors, so you can have personal data for your contacts or assign to a project a typology or a state of reading. You can also “include” works one into another. The easiest example is a collective work under a unique title and an editor, but with multiple articles and authors within. Creating the “includer” and “included” projects, authors, editors or compilers, and linking included with includer makes it possible to cite (and browse) them afterwards with no chance of error (except programming errors, of course ;)
Once a contact and a project (or projects) are created (and linked one to each other) you can assign them to a “bibliography”. You can create as much bibliographies as you like: one for my master’s dissertation, another one for my Ph.D. Thesis, another one for that paper that I have to write for that journal, etc. It’s easy, then, to assign projects (articles, books, etc.) to a bibliography, so, at last, you can browse your selected bibliography and have a list of all the references perfectly cited, ready to be copy and pasted at the end of your paper. All in all, assigning a bibliography is kind of assigning a category to the project. Nevertheless, an independent system of categories is build and assignable both to contacts and projects.
As administrator, then, you can browse three lists or reports: contacts, projects and bibliographies. You can assign categories and bibliographies to the first two. And maintain the list of categories, languages, types of authors, types of projects and countries. Concerning the look, I’ve tried to make the whole thing compatible with WordPress themes, but some recoding is always necessary.
The first database I programmed was in MS Access. Actually, I still work with it because it is easier for me (specially when there’s no connection near) to work with it from my USB pen drive. Then, I upload from time to time the updated content to the one in the server. But MS Access is quite difficult to make it work for a web browser (I’m but a programmer). My personal (but not professional) interest in programming and LAMP made me try to recode what I was using in MySQL+PHP. BibCiter is the result. My intention is, once 90% of the bugs and horribly bad code is translated to just bad code I’ll open it and give it away to the public domain under some free license. If you are really really interested in helping me out, just let me know.
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