This was going to be only a post about how I got the Ghost newsletter software to use Amazon Simple Email Service (AWS SES) instead of the built-in Mailgun support, but it turned into that plus why I can't use Ghost for the DLTJ Newsletter.

Ghost's bulk email delivery problem …

The British Library suffered a major cyber attack in October 2023 that encrypted and destroyed servers, exfiltrated 600GB of data, and has had an ongoing disruption of library services after four months. Yesterday, the Library published an 18-page report on the lessons they are learning. (There are also some community …

While on vacation, I was catching up on some personal knowledge management maintenance I had been putting off. At one task—adding a page for a new employee at the company I work for—I noticed that the page for my company was gone. Odd, that page has been in …

WOLFcon—the World Open Library Foundation Conference—was held last month, and all of the meetings were recorded using Zoom. Almost all of the sessions were presentations and knowledge-sharing, so giving the recordings a wider audience on YouTube make sense. With nearly 50 sessions, though, manually processing the recordings would …

According to reputable sources, this blog contains 0.00006% of the world's knowledge.

1. The large language models (LLMs) that underlie tools like ChatGPT and Bing-AI are being used as question-answering tools. If you listen to the hype surrounding what LLMs can do, you can hardly be faulted for thinking that …

On March 16, 2023, I gave a presentation with this title to the code4lib conference in Princeton, New Jersey. The suggested links from the end of the presentation are listed below followed by a rough transcript of the talk.

As I noted in the talk, the judge in the Hachette …

If you have been following social media news, you know that Twitter is having its issues. Although there is still a bit to go before it goes away (or, more likely, puts up a paywall to view tweets), it seems prudent to save Twitter content so it can be viewed …

The day after I posted LibNFT: a Project in Search of a Purpose, the project proponents held their CNI project briefing. The recording of that briefing is now online, and I've made some annotations on the recording transcript. I came away with a more nuanced understanding of the proposed project …

At first, I thought this was a parody.

However, it seems like a serious proposal that was presented today at a CNI project briefing. I did not attend …

A number of Mastodon operators have started to report the impact of the #TwitterMigration on their instances. I started gathering these because I was curious about what it takes to run a public or semi-public Mastodon instance. These reports are full of those kinds of details, but they also describe …

Much has been made about the differences between Twitter and Mastodon: the challenge of finding a home for your account (and the corresponding differences between your “local” timeline and your “global” timeline), the intentional …

On November 7, 2022, OCLC and Clarivate announced a settlement in their lawsuit about using WorldCat records in the embryonic MetaDoor service. This ended the latest chapter in the saga of reuse of library metadata with little new clarity. The settlement terms were not disclosed, but we can learn a …

I'm finding it valuable to create annotations on resources to index into my personal knowledge management system. (The Obsidian journaling post from late last year goes into some depth about my process.) I use the Hypothesis service to do this—Hypothesis annotations are imported into Markdown files for Obsidian using …

This is the web page I wish I had found when I spent the afternoon sorting through why AWS CloudFormation kept telling me:

Resource handler returned message: "Invalid request provided: AWS::CloudFront::PublicKey"

Like me, you might be working on a Serverless.com stack and are trying to restrict access …

In the past few months, I've created about a half-dozen projects using "serverless" infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS). (And I'm about to start another one.) Over the course of these projects, I've refined my development environment into something that I think is useful to share, so read on for …

I was introduced to structured logs at work, and this ol' hacker thinks that is a darn good idea. For a new program I'm writing, I wanted to put that into use. The program uses AWS Lambdas, and the log entries for the Lambdas end up in CloudWatch Logs. Unfortunately …

Okay, a half-step backward to fix something I broke yesterday. As I described earlier this year, this static website blog uses the Webmention protocol to notify others when I link to their content and receive notifications from others. Behind the scenes, I'm using the Jekyll plugin called jekyll-webmention_io to integrate …

When I converted this blog from WordPress to a static site generated with Jekyll in 2018, I lost the ability for readers to make comments. At the time, I thought that one day I would set up an installation of Discourse for comments like Boing Boing did in 2013. But …

Bryan Brown's tweet led me to Ruth Kitchin Tillman's Repository Ouroboros post about the treadmill of software development/deployment. And wow do I have thoughts and feelings.

Earlier this month, my Twitter timeline lit up with mentions of a half-day webinar called Cybersecurity Landscape - Protecting the Scholarly Infrastructure. What had riled up the people I follow on Twitter was the first presentation: "Security Collaboration for Library Resource Access" by Cory Roach, the chief information security officer at …