On Monday the Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched the export of blog posts in PDF and other formats. Over the last few days I have been busy improving the PDF output, and today I am releasing a new version, available for all the more than 13K science blog posts archived by Rogue Scholar. The PDF is generated using the open source Pandoc universal document converter in combination with the Weasyprint library.

On Monday the Rogue Scholar science blog archive added support for exporting the blog posts in various formats: markdown, ePub, and PDF. Today I am adding another export format: JATS XML, the standard format for scholarly articles. JATS is again automatically generated with the Pandoc universal document converter, with some initial tweaks of the Rogue Scholar metadata.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive starts 2024 with an important release: all blog posts (more than 13,000) are now available for download in Markdown, ePub, and PDF formats. This builds on work completed in December to store the full text of every Rogue Scholar blog post in Markdown format in the Rogue Scholar backend. Combined with the metadata in YAML format, these posts can now be downloaded via the Rogue Scholar API, e.g.

Sometimes we want to preserve a blog post to read or reuse later. There are generic tools for that purpose, including read-it-later apps such as Instapaper or Pocket. For scholarly blog posts, the right place can also be a reference manager, which stores the content and the metadata, especially if a DOI was registered for each blog post. Reference managers can store full-text documents and typically use PDF as the file format.

Writing software is more than writing code – good documentation is one essential aspect. A lot of the tools and libraries that make writing documentation easier use markdown as a file format, combined with metadata in yaml format and optionally some additional functionality, e.g. mdx – which combines markdown with jsx for JSX-based projects such as React.

Shortly following an update earlier this week, the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has updated or added two features today: better documentation and new comments.Documentation The Rogue Scholar documentation site was launched with the service but hasn't seen any updates in several months. Today I updated the platforms page, explaining what blogging platforms are used by the blogs participating in Rogue Scholar and how they are integrated.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive launched two new features today: GUIDs (globally unique identifiers) and support for OECD Fields of Science and Technology. Globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) GUIDs are used to globally identify a blog post and are part of the RSS, Atom, and JSON Feed specifications.

Today I am relaunching the Syldavia Gazette blog on a new blogging platform, switching from Ghost to Quarto. This allows me to use Jupyter notebooks in the blog to help generate blog posts.

Blogs participating in the Rogue Scholar science blog archive are now archived in the Internet Archive. Starting November 1st, Rogue Scholar is participating in the Internet Archive Archive-It service and all archived blogs can be found here. Archiving of all blog posts, associated HTML pages, and media will automatically happen every six months, with the first round of archiving well underway.

With an update launched yesterday, all blogs that participate in the Rogue Scholar science blog archive are now searchable by blog title, description, language, blogging platform, category (scientific field using the OECD Fields of Science and Technology), and ISSN.