This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive reached another big milestone: 2,000 blog posts archived (2,242 as of today). This was achieved by adding new blogs (now 39) but, more importantly, by archiving older posts from the participating blogs.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive adds important functionality to existing science blogs, namely archiving, full-text search, and DOI registration. While a lot of effort has gone into making Rogue Scholar as affordable as possible by using Open Source software, automation, and involving the community, it still costs money to build and run scholarly infrastructure, including scholarly infrastructure for science blogs.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive adds important functionality to existing blogs, namely long-term archiving, full-text search, and DOI registration. In this week's update, I focussed on improving functionality that is specific for blogs and not really found regularly with other formats for scholarly content. Tags Tags are a common way to categorize blog posts and help find content of interest.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive is growing nicely, reaching more than 1,500 blog posts this week, and 5-10 new posts every week. You can subscribe to all the blogs you are interested in via an RSS Reader and use various strategies to find and read interesting content, but some people prefer to receive regular email updates instead.
This week I added blog administration self-service to the Rogue Scholar blog archive. This makes adding a blog to Rogue Scholar easier, faster, and cheaper. To start blog administration please create an account with Rogue Scholar. Use the "Sign In" Link in the upper right corner to sign in or create an account with username and password, or sign in via Google or GitHub. Once signed in, you can add your blog via the Dashboard page.
Two weeks ago I added a first version of full-text search to the Rogue Scholar blog archive. This was a good start, as blogs typically only have the timeline, tags, and metadata like titles and authors to help readers find relevant content.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched in April and I have been busy building out the core features of archiving the full-text of blog posts, establishing a full-text search, and registering DOIs and metadata for all posts. My announced goal was to complete this work by the end of the second quarter.
In January I started the Rogue Scholar blog archive with the slogan "science blogging on steroids", promising to enhance science blogs in important ways. Earlier this month I began DOI registrations for blog posts, and I am well on track to complete this for the included 35 blogs with more than 1,000 blog posts in the next few weeks.
Two weeks ago I started registering DOIs for blog posts included in the Rogue Scholar blog archive. It is an automated process but involves a lot of manual checks. So far I have registered 231 blog posts from 20 different science blogs, and I hope to finish the DOI registrations by the end of the month.
The Rogue Scholar archive of scholarly blogs has grown to 34 blogs with about 420 blog posts. In order to implement DOI registration for these blog posts, I needed two things: Content and metadata, ideally without requiring blogs to implement anything special.
