Improvements in Rogue Scholar: tags and images

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. They are either used fairly flexibly, or with a predefined list, and posts can have zero, one, or multiple tags. The main reason tags exist is that most blogging platforms don't have good search functionality. As Rogue Scholar has a full-text search powered by Typesense, tags are less important. They are still helpful, and this week they have been improved in the following ways:

• Tags have been normalized, removing any hashes, hyphens, and lowercase first letters, so that searching for #Covid-19 will also find COVID 19,and searching for Pre-Printwill also find preprint.
• Tags for blog posts are now clickable, triggering a search with that tag (either for a given blog or all posts)
• Pagination now supports tags, so that a search for the tag Open Access lets you paginate through the 68 results on five pages.

Feature Images

Optional Feature images can highlight visual information in a blog post. Some blogging platforms, e.g. Ghost or Medium, use them prominently, but there is more than one way to implement them in RSS or Atom feeds. As Rogue Scholar has access to the full-text HTML, it is easy to pick a feature image if none exists already. Starting this week Rogue Scholar automatically displays the first image that is at least 100px wide found in the full-text.

Both new features are available now. Feedback via comments, Discourse, or email is always welcomed, as this is the first version of this functionality. Some images for example don't display properly because they were moved or because the browser complains about mixed (HTTPS and HTTP) content.

References

Fenner M. The Rogue Scholar is now open for business. Published online April 4, 2023. doi:10.53731/z9v2s-bh329

Fenner M. Rogue Scholar full-text search improvements. Published online July 10, 2023. doi:10.53731/6r1dx-wdp04