For a while now I’ve been running a weekly script which connects to ROAR and grabs the number of records for each UK based Institutional Repository. I’ve finally got around to writing a web front end to this, which you can see here. All quite basic at the moment, and I have lots of ideas of what I could do to improve this (one idea based on the compare average number of deposits per repository). Have a look and let me know what you think, and let me know of any bugs.

UK Repository Records Statistics (the name sucks!)

Google released an API for their Book Search at the end of last week. You can implement this in two ways: static (just linking to a URL with a ISBN inserted) or dynamic, which basically means using javascript, which will check to see if Google have the book available as the page loads and can show a link accordingly.

The (very rough and basic) ‘catalogue’ I recently created already had a link to Google Books for each item. This was just a very simple URL with an ISBN stuck on the end, e.g. http://books.google.com/books?as_isbn=0596003722

Tonight I have made the first steps in adding links to items using the Google Books API using both the static (simple) and dynamic methods.

You can see an example here http://www.nostuff.org/tdn/6b/item.php?item=0596003722.

You can also do a search via http://www.nostuff.org/tdn/6b/

The layout is currently very rough, and the dynamic search is broken in that it will only show a result for the first ISBN for a given item (I know why but don’t have time to fix now).

I have to confess I know very little javascript. The examples from Google only use a few lines of code but not really understanding what it did, did not help. For example, for the dyanmic display, I found it did not work at all, until I added a second paragraph tag for every ISBN. I can’t see what in the js makes this so

I helped someone set up sky broadband.

• They supplied the (decent) router for free, it came nicely packaged with everything you could possibly need and a very clear full colour guide.
• The modem/router was pre-configured. It was amazingly simple to setup: turn on, and we had instant access with wired in connection. connect to the wireless network and enter the preset password, and that was it. I felt cheated.

Of course I imagine customer support to be dire, but am impressed with what I have seen so far, especially as they seem to be offering it free on top of their TV package.

pizdaus.com : strangly addictive open submission photo site.