affable-lurking

Thanks to the magic of flickr stats, I’ve been able to track views of specific photographs on my flickr stream. Now I usually get 20-50 views per day (aside from last month when a private set was getting a few hundred views per day for over a week) and one photo in particular keeps cropping up in the daily viewed list.

This one: Sea slater (Ligia oceanica)

I’d not bothered to consider why, until I received an email from a Hong Kong based publisher requesting permission to use that image in their new biology text book, to which I agreed (Published! Yay!)

A bit of further digging, and I found out that image is also the top hit on yahoo image search for Sea Slater and for Ligia oceanica. Flickr is owned by yahoo, so it makes sense that yahoo image search would index the flickr database and that the publishers found the photograph via yahoo image search.

Eager to see if my luck was as good on google image search, I searched for the same two terms that works on yahoo. Nadda. I’m not anywhere on the first 5 pages - I gave up looking after those. So, perhaps this post, when indexed by google, will also get my sea slater (Ligia oceanica) noticed.

Oh, the creature in the photo? It’s a marine dwelling relative of the common woodlouse. Looks a bit like a modern-day trilobite to me. There is some more into over at the wiki page.

Yes, this post was pretty much a blatent attempt to manipulate my GIS rank for that photo. Will it work?

Today, via but she’s a girl I discovered an incredibly useful piece of software - Papers.  Now I’m not the most tidy person in the world anyway, but when it comes to journal articles and papers I’m hopeless. I keep my references in a bibtex database managed by  Jabref, but as for managing actual electronic copies of the papers themselves, I tend to end up with various directories full of half sorted PDFs all with cryptic names like “fulltext” or “sdarticle1″.

For a while I’ve been toying with the idea of a script to read whatever metadata is contained in the PDF and attempt to rename and sort the articles into some semblance of order. Today, within three hours of downloading Papers, I’d managed to catalog, rename and tag around 300 PDFs.

Just import a PDF and Papers attempts to rename it sensibly and store it somewhere equally sensible. The software offers the option to search one or more of the online abstracts databases (web of science, google-scholar, etc) for keywords in the articles to locate missing metadata.

I did go a bit overboard at first, and let the program import every PDF I had on my desktop, this has resulted in about a dozen software manuals and component datasheets also being added to the catalog.  I can deal with this.
Papers does seem to be rather biased towards the sciences more than the humanities and arts; for example the default searches do not include any of the specific humanities abstract databases.

If you are a Mac using, OSX running, disorganised scientist, it’s well worth the £20 asking price.

Now running on the new server, lots more space and bandwidth. Also now running the Debian-stable version of wordpress, so although old, it should be secure and do away with the bi-monthly wordpress updates. No idea what happened to the posts made in February - they’ve just vanished into the ether.

I should concentrate on writing some stuff to post here now.

Moving servers - will attempt to find out where the last few posts went too. Stuff is going to be messy for a day or so.

Happy new year*

*The Bad Astronomer explains just what a year is these days - saves me having to.