web-service | Thought splinters

Memento Time Travel

Tue, 25 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Research with archived web data

In a previous article, I wrote about the possibilities of the Wayback Machine for scientific writing. I argued that archiving web pages are essential for references as they prevent link rots when cited web resources are not available anymore. With this blog entry, I am looking into the reverse option: Finding and retrieving archived web pages for research reasons.

Archived web pages as permanently stored data are indispensable for reproducibility issues. But they are also valuable research resources as they are data for historical and comparative research.

This article rewrites my blog entry from 2019 on Scraping Archived Data with the Wayback Machine in three aspects:

I am going into more detail to explain the Memento Protocol that stands behind the archiving procedures of the Internet Archive with the Wayback Machine.
I will demonstrate the research significance of archived data with another — more simple — example. Instead, to analyze yearly differences in the ranking of the popularity of static site generators, I will focus on the number of statistical packages developed by the R community over time. The website structure for static site generators is complex, has changed several times, and contradicts the demonstration purpose.¹
To argue the importance of archived data convincingly, it is necessary to extract the URLs of archived data and use these data for research issues. Therefore, I will show how R can scrape web data and display the data for further analysis.

How does the Memento API work?

Mementos are prior versions of web pages cached by web crawlers and stored in web archives. The HTTP-based Memento framework is a description for Time-Based Access to Resource States.

With Mementos, you can access a version of a Web resource as it existed at some date in the past. The complete information about the Memento Project is specified in RFC 7089 as HTTP Framework for Time-Based Access to Resource States – Memento. I will explain the essential idea with the gentle non-technical introduction on the Memento website.

In the Memento protocol there are four important components:

Original Resource (URI-R): A Web resource that exists or used to exist on the live Web for which we want to find a prior version.

Memento (URI-M): A Web resource that is a prior version of the Original Resource. Prior versions are Web resources encapsulated in what the Original Resource was like at some time in the past.

TimeGate (URI-G): A Web resource that “decides” on the basis of a given datetime, which Memento best matches what the Original Resource was like around that given datetime.

TimeMap (URI-T): A list of URIs of Mementos of the Original Resource that is archived, e.g., available online.

The central component is the TimeMap Resource. It is a machine-readable document that lists the Original Resource itself, its TimeGate, and its Mementos, as well as associated metadata such as archival DateTime for Mementos.

The HTTP-based Memento framework bridges the present and past Web. It facilitates obtaining representations of prior states of a given resource by introducing datetime negotiation and TimeMaps. Datetime negotiation is a variation on content negotiation that leverages the given resource’s URI and a user agent’s preferred datetime. TimeMaps are lists that enumerate URIs of resources that encapsulate prior states of the given resource. (Quoted from RFC 7089)

Architectural overview of how the Memento framework supports batch discovery of prior/archived versions of a resource (Mementos).

Where to find the desired information?

To demonstrate the interplay of the Memento protocol with the Wayback Machine, I will look into the history of the R project web page. I want to know the number of available packages over time.

There are three web pages where I can find out the number of available packages:

Contributed Packages

Contributed Packages: On this page is the number of available packages written directly under the subheading “Available Packages”.

Page ‘Contributed Packages’ mentions the number of available packages.

Packages By Name

Available CRAN Packages By Name: This page list all packages alphabetically. One could count the lines with the package’s name to get the desired number.

Screenshot of the web page ‘Available CRAN Packages By Name’.

Packages By Date of Publication

Available CRAN Packages By Date of Publication: This page list all packages by date of publication. Here one could also count the lines with the package’s dates to get the desired number.

Screenshot of the web page ‘Available CRAN Packages By Date of Publication’.

Which page to scrape?

The question now arises if these pages are also available in the past. And if so: Have they the same structure to use the identical CSS selector in all archived instances?

The question now arises if this page is available also in the past. And if so: Has it the same structure to use the identical CSS selector in all prior archived instances?

Contributed Packages

It turns out that the first line after the subheading could be scraped with the CSS selector #pkgs + p.

Context menue via right clicke opened to select the code inspector.

Code inspector detects CSS selector ‘h3#pgks’ and displays this result with a magnifier glass.

To check if the website structure for the paragraph after the header with id = “pkgs” remains constant, we can use the browser plugin for the Wayback Machine (available for Google Chrome and Firefox.).

Browser Plugin Wayback Machine

If you click on the Wayback Machine plugin, you can either go directly to the first or last (recent) snapshot of this web page. I choose “Overview” to display the calendar to inspect different instances of the archived page.

The calender displays time span and distribution of the archived page.

The calendar shows that the page was between May 14, 2008, and April 13, 2021, 145 times archived. From this overview page, one can select different instances and content and design of the ‘Contributed Packages’ page. To get an idea of possible changes in the structure, I start with the first instance of the archived page.

The number of times the page was crawled by the Wayback Machine (in my example: 145) has nothing to do with how often the page was updated.

Screenshot of the ‘Contributed Package’ page from May 14, 2008.

The archived page displays a different layout. The number of packages is not immediately after the first heading but after several paragraphs later (see number 2 in the image). Also, the name of the heading has changed from “Available Packages” to “Available Bundles and Packages”. But more importantly: The paragraph following immediately of this header mentions the amounts of different kinds of packages and bundles. It would be challenging to detect the desired number (in this case, 1425 packages) programmatically.

A further inspection shows that the id still remains “pkgs”. But because of the different text of the first paragraph, I want to look at another page to grab my desired information easier.

Packages By Name

Here I will demonstrate the use of a helpful tool. The Web scraping 101 vignettes of the rvest package references SelectgorGadget, a JavaScript bookmarklet to find out the required CSS selector interactively.

SelectorGadget selects the first name.

After selecting the first name, the SelectorGadget shows the CSS selector a, referring to all hyperlinks of this page. At the bottom, you can see that there are 17674 hyperlinks on this page. The problem is that the headline consists of the letters of the alphabet, which also are hyperlinks.

SelectorGadget selects the first letter of the alphabet.

To select another position on the page with the SelectorGadget, subtracts these selected items. The bottom line shows the CSS selector with ‘td a’ (table data followed by a hyperlink) and removes the 26 characters to get 17648 selected objects. So this would be an easy way to get the number of available R packages.

The first archived page starts with September 24, 2011, and reduces, therefore, our survey period. But more important: From the 193 archived pages (more than the 145 instances of the ‘Contributed Package’ page!) are many redirects.

Calender view with many green cicled dates (=redirects).

The size of the circles displays the number of pages crawled. Blue is directly archived, green is an archived page after a redirect. I could not find a solution to distinguish the difference between direct archiving and after a redirect programmatically. The problem with a redirect is that the same state of a page is archived several times but counts as different pages in time. This pollutes the resulting data set.

Packages by Date of Publication

Finally, I decided to scrape the page “Packages by Date of Publication” with the simple CSS selector ‘a’. It has the same period as the “Package By Name” page (the first instance is from September 26, 2011). It was archived only 81 times but with very few redirects.

Calendar view of the ‘Packages by Date of Publication’ page.

Memento protocol in action

Package installation

At first, we have to install and load the wayback package, a wonderful and very practical library of Memento API wrappers, written by Bob Rudis.²

In the meanwhile there exists another package with the same name on CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network). It is dedicated to the installation for legacy R versions and has nothing to do with the wayback package on GitHub for the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive.

if (!require("wayback"))
        {remotes::install_github("hrbrmstr/wayback", build_vignettes = TRUE)
        library(wayback)}

## Loading required package: wayback

Mementos Link Types

The next step is to use the get_mementos() function. With get_mementos(url, timestamp = format(Sys.Date(), "%Y")) we will receive a shortlist of relevant links to the archived content. Only the first parameter, url, is mandatory. If no timestamp is provided, then the actual year is taken, and the most recent archived page will be the endpoint, which in our case is ok. The function will return the 4 link relation types as in the Request for Comment for the Memento framework described and outlined above.

Link Relation Type “original.”
Link Relation Type “timemap.”
Link Relation Type “timegate.”
Link Relation Type “memento.”

url = "https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html"
cran_link_types <- wayback::get_mementos(url)
saveRDS(cran_link_types, "data/cran_link_types.rds")

cran_link_types <- readRDS("data/cran_link_types.rds")
knitr::kable(cran_link_types, 
             caption = "Memento Link Types", 
             label="memento-link-types", 
             format = "html")

Table 1: Memento Link Types
link	rel	ts
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html	original	NA
http://web.archive.org/web/timemap/link/https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html	timemap	NA
http://web.archive.org/web/https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html	timegate	NA
http://web.archive.org/web/20110926172444/http://cran.r-project.org:80/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html	first memento	2011-09-26 17:24:44
http://web.archive.org/web/20210128201734/https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html	prev memento	2021-01-28 20:17:34
http://web.archive.org/web/20210130222751/https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html	memento	2021-01-30 22:27:51
http://web.archive.org/web/20210412212953/http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html	next memento	2021-04-12 21:29:53
http://web.archive.org/web/20210412212953/http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html	last memento	2021-04-12 21:29:53

Besides these 4 main types of link relations, the function also provides the first, previous, next, and last available memento. When no particular date is given, then the last memento is identical with the next (= nearest) memento. In addition to the two columns, link and rel, there is a third one, ts, containing the timestamps (empty for the first 3 link relation types). The return value in total is a tibble with eight observations (rows) and three columns.³

Memento Craw List

Providing an URL in the search field of the Wayback Machine results in the interactive browser version to the calendar view as shown by Figure 12 and Figure 13. The dates with archived content are blue or green (= redirected URL) circles. The bigger the circles, the more snapshots were archived on these dates.

We get these dated crawl lists with the get_timemap() function using the second observation of the result of the get_mementos function. This is in our case cran_link_types$link[2].

The execution of the following code chunk can take some time, depending on how many pages of the URL are archived. Be aware that the Wayback server is strained by this query, so do not repeat this operation. I store the result on my hard disk and will use the saved data for further processing.

cran_link_types <- readRDS("data/cran_link_types.rds")
cran_crawl_list <- wayback::get_timemap(cran_link_types$link[2])
saveRDS(cran_crawl_list, "data/cran_crawl_list.rds")

cran_crawl_list <- readRDS("data/cran_crawl_list.rds")
reactable::reactable(
    cran_crawl_list,
    pagination = FALSE, 
    highlight = TRUE, 
    height = 500,
    compact = TRUE,
    bordered = TRUE,
    striped = TRUE,
    wrap = FALSE,
    resizable = TRUE
    )

We get a table with 85 rows, where the first three rows are not relevant for our purpose, and the last row is empty. So we get 85 - 3 - 1 = 81 mementos, which conforms to the number of Figure 13. The URLs to the mementos are pretty long. You can widen/narrow the columns to inspect the structure of the URLs. Typically they start with “http://web.archive.org/web/” followed by the date-time string of the memento and the original URL.

Harvesting Web Pages

We have now collected all the URLs for the mementos. The next task is now getting our data from these pages and display them in a graphic. For this last step, we will use the packages rvest and ggplot2. It is a “standard” task of manipulating HTML and has only insofar with the memento framework to do, as we are using the URLs of the archived web pages.

Tidy data

We only need the memento links, date, and new column for our number of available packages.

library(tidyverse)

## ── Attaching packages ─────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse 1.3.1 ──

## ✓ ggplot2 3.3.3     ✓ purrr   0.3.4
## ✓ tibble  3.1.2     ✓ dplyr   1.0.6
## ✓ tidyr   1.1.3     ✓ stringr 1.4.0
## ✓ readr   1.4.0     ✓ forcats 0.5.1

## ── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
## x dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## x dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()

cran_tidy_data <- readRDS("data/cran_crawl_list.rds") %>% 
  filter(stringr::str_detect(rel, "memento")) %>% 
  mutate(date = anytime::anydate(datetime)) %>% 
  add_column(pkgs = 0) %>% 
  select(link, date, pkgs)
saveRDS(cran_tidy_data, "data/cran_tidy_data.rds")

glimpse(cran_tidy_data)

## Rows: 81
## Columns: 3
## $ link <chr> "http://web.archive.org/web/20110926172444/http://cran.r-project.…
## $ date <date> 2011-09-26, 2011-10-11, 2011-10-29, 2011-11-29, 2011-12-29, 2012…
## $ pkgs <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,…

For the purpose of this demonstration, I do not want to scrape every one of the 81 links but only one link per year. As the archiving dates do not have a systematic regularity, we cannot provide time series, say January 1st every year. But this does not matter for this demo.

cran_yearly_links <- readRDS("data/cran_tidy_data.rds") %>% 
  dplyr::mutate(year = lubridate::year(date), .after = "date")  

cran_yearly_links <- cran_yearly_links[!duplicated(cran_yearly_links[ , "year"]), ]
saveRDS(cran_yearly_links, "data/cran_yearly_links.rds")
cran_yearly_links

## # A tibble: 11 x 4
##    link                                                   date        year  pkgs
##    <chr>                                                  <date>     <dbl> <dbl>
##  1 http://web.archive.org/web/20110926172444/http://cran… 2011-09-26  2011     0
##  2 http://web.archive.org/web/20120127155954/http://cran… 2012-01-27  2012     0
##  3 http://web.archive.org/web/20130121072548/http://cran… 2013-01-21  2013     0
##  4 http://web.archive.org/web/20140402061423/http://cran… 2014-04-02  2014     0
##  5 http://web.archive.org/web/20150124092856/http://cran… 2015-01-24  2015     0
##  6 http://web.archive.org/web/20160104062049/https://cra… 2016-01-04  2016     0
##  7 http://web.archive.org/web/20170502002538/http://cran… 2017-05-02  2017     0
##  8 http://web.archive.org/web/20180822083144/https://cra… 2018-08-22  2018     0
##  9 http://web.archive.org/web/20190103070122/http://cran… 2019-01-03  2019     0
## 10 http://web.archive.org/web/20200103222850/https://cra… 2020-01-03  2020     0
## 11 http://web.archive.org/web/20210128201734/https://cra… 2021-01-28  2021     0

Get number of available packages

Although there are only 10 web pages to scrape, this will still take some time. Therefore I provide a progress indicator to monitor how much time the procedure will still last.

library(rvest)

cran_pkgs <- readRDS("data/cran_yearly_links.rds")
max = nrow(cran_pkgs)

pb <- txtProgressBar(min = 0, max = max, style = 3)
  for(i in 1:max) {
      html <- read_html(cran_pkgs$link[i])
      links <- html_nodes(html, "a")
      cran_pkgs$pkgs[i] <- length(links)
    setTxtProgressBar(pb, i)
    }
close(pb)
saveRDS(cran_pkgs, "data/cran_pkgs.rds")

(avail_pkgs <- readRDS("data/cran_pkgs.rds"))

## # A tibble: 11 x 4
##    link                                                   date        year  pkgs
##    <chr>                                                  <date>     <dbl> <dbl>
##  1 http://web.archive.org/web/20110926172444/http://cran… 2011-09-26  2011  3307
##  2 http://web.archive.org/web/20120127155954/http://cran… 2012-01-27  2012  3563
##  3 http://web.archive.org/web/20130121072548/http://cran… 2013-01-21  2013  4262
##  4 http://web.archive.org/web/20140402061423/http://cran… 2014-04-02  2014  5374
##  5 http://web.archive.org/web/20150124092856/http://cran… 2015-01-24  2015  6221
##  6 http://web.archive.org/web/20160104062049/https://cra… 2016-01-04  2016  7722
##  7 http://web.archive.org/web/20170502002538/http://cran… 2017-05-02  2017 10513
##  8 http://web.archive.org/web/20180822083144/https://cra… 2018-08-22  2018 12938
##  9 http://web.archive.org/web/20190103070122/http://cran… 2019-01-03  2019 13645
## 10 http://web.archive.org/web/20200103222850/https://cra… 2020-01-03  2020 15348
## 11 http://web.archive.org/web/20210128201734/https://cra… 2021-01-28  2021 17038

Visualizing the results

I am not going to produce a sophisticated graphic. A simple line graph to see how the number of packages is increasing has to be enough.

p <- readRDS("data/cran_pkgs.rds") %>% 
  ggplot(aes(year, pkgs, group = 1)) +
  geom_line()
p

Summary

In this post, I have presented the memento protocol, a framework to generate and retrieve prior versions of web pages cached by web crawlers and stored in web archives. I have explained how to Memento API for the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive is working. With the wayback packages by Bob Rudis, I have demonstrated the practical handling to use the framework for retrieving, collecting, and displaying historical data.

Recently, even the URL has changed from https://www.staticgen.com/ to https://jamstack.org/generators/.↩︎
I have forked his GitHub repo and looked into his R scripts. I have to say that I became somewhat depressed as I noticed how much knowledge I am still lacking. Despite working now for four years with R, there are so many think I still have to learn!↩︎
In many cases, the last memento is identical with the memento link relation type. Then the tibble has only seven rows.↩︎

Wakelet - Share Visually-Engaging Stories

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What is a Wakelet?

Several months ago, I came across Wakelet. My first impression was that it is another social bookmarker because you can “bookmark anything you find online in two clicks.” But after some days working with it, I noticed it is more than that.

The reason for my changed awareness of Wakelet is its feature to create stories. Arranging bookmarks into “collections,” you can organize your bookmarks, adding text, and include images to get your narrative across. With Wakelet, you curate and share content not only in a meaningful but also in a visually-engaging way.

How do People use Wakelet?

I think the best way is to illustrate the possibilities and benefits of Wakelet is by showcasing some excellent examples. I have grouped my collected Wakelets, and to demonstrate the range of different options, I have always provided two instances for each category.

This is the first and prominent use of content curation, especially for education. @realUcyJoy is as an educational entrepreneur and advocate passionate about the use of education technology in Africa to improve learning. She shares a collection of 20 Digital skills for educators with us. Another very sophisticated design of a Wakelet resource page has @drbexl (Dr. Bex Lewis) created.

Portfolio

My name twin @FelixBaumgartner (I am not related to him) famous for his spectacular skydive uses Wakelet to promote himself and his adventurous projects. All collections on his homepage serve as material for media publications. Another showcasing page maintains Beth Tweddle @bethtweddlenews), a gymnastics Olympic medallist.

Raising awareness

The Rohingya Crisis @Rohingya uses Wakelet for political reasons to draw support to stop the genocide, ethnic cleansing and numerous crimes against the Rohingya. The Glasgow Centre for Population Health @theGCPH documents its conferences on providing leadership for action to tackle inequality and improve health via a series of tweeds, as can be seen by the example of its Glasgow’s Healthier Future Forum 20.

Philippe Schuler @Phil demonstrates his love for sports, drums, photography, nature, and travel with some astonishing photographs. Another example of this kind of usages gives Teijas ky @teijasky, one of the developers of Wakelet. He binds his amazing marine biology photos from the Galapagos Islands into a story of the history of the geological and biological processes of this archipelago.

Education

There are many examples of educational applications of Wakelet. Educational scenarios with Wakelet are so crucial for the developers that they dedicated a particular homepage for learning communities. There is a specialized guide for educators, translated into several languages providing tips and tricks. (Surprisingly, a guide in German is still missing.) Some example Wakes are Ancient Greek Philosophy for learning and The EdTech Toolbox - 2019 for teaching. See the blog of Kathleen Morris and Online Tools for teaching and learning for more learning activities and educational scenarios with Wakelets.

Figure 1: Six Use Cases for Wakelets

Wakelet and the SAMR model

Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR model exemplifies the meaningful integration of technology into teaching. Instead of using “tech for tech’s sake,” the SAMR model features a view inspired by social constructivism.¹

Figure 2: Getting started with Wakelet: Graphic by Kathleen Morris

Substitution: Students read an article on Wakelet instead of in class.
Augmentation: Wakelet allows for multimodality by enabling users to embed images, videos, articles, and more.
Modification: Students curate information and resources about a specific topic on Wakelet and can share it widely via social media for feedback. Students critically analyze content and research to create an archive for discussion.
Redefinition: Students have access to real-time collaboration on multimodal content curation.

Wakelet works seamlessly with various apps

Figure 3: Ten different options to include content into a Wake.(Screenshot)

You can embed “Wakes” (= collection of items) into your web pages as I have done with the three referenced Wakelets above. (You can’t produce Wakes from Wakelet homepages.) There are three different formats to choose from and some design options how to present the Wakes.

The example above is an embedded Wake referring to other Wakes. Click on the different sections to get the referenced Wakes. You can also produce PDFs from your Wakes, but the PDFs are not interactive anymore. Look at this PDF example.

Storing content is just a two click action with its browser extensions, available for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Wakelet comes with mobile apps for Android (Google Play) and iOS (App Store) and it works also seamlessly with various tools like

Microsoft Teams
Microsoft OneNote — See: Better together: OneNote and Wakelet.
Google Drive — See: Google Drive Integration
Google Classroom
Remind
Fliprid — See: Flipgrid Integration

Wakelet is free and always will be

Wakelet also has a refined help system featuring many short but informative videos explaining the different highlights. Wakelet also comes with a specialized guide for educators in several languages. (Surprisingly, a guide in German is still missing.)

Furthermore, Wakelet is confidence-inspiring as it has sensible rules of usage and stringent privacy policy as well. And the best of it:

Wakelet is free and always will be. All of the features available now will remain free forever, even if we introduce premium plans in the future.

Feature requests

There are a two features I wish Wakelet would include. Both have to do with collaboration and sharing. I am not sure if my desires are in line with the developer’s strategy and plans. But anyway, here they are:

Genuine collaboration: At the moment, I can only invite contributors to add links but not to change or to delete the work I have done. So there is no real interworking in the sense of cross-functional cooperation possible. All the participants work in parallel but not as coordinated team players.
Community evaluation: Sharing links is okay but lacks quality control. I would like to have feedback from the community either as comments or as attached discussion fora. Tools like stars to appraise Wakes, as well as links, would also foster the community discussion and showcase the best collections. Make this a feature to turn on/turn off, so that people could decide if they want to draw critiques and spend time for discussions.

Update 2021-05-19: Both my feature requests are in the meanwhile realized.

Collaboration: The creator of a collection can offer a QR code, an alphanumeric code, or an URL. You can join a collection by one of these three options. You do not even have to log in! Watch this video. — Another (even newer) feature is “spaces”: With just several clicks, users can create a “space” to house content to be shared.

Community evaluation: Several icons (like 👍, 👏, 💯) are added so that visitors can give their “likes” to the collection in general or to individual links. Admittedly this is only a rudimentary evaluation, but you always can open up your wakelet for free collaboration so that other people can add additional links or comments.

Conclusion

Wakelet is not only a free sophisticated tool for content curation but also well-suited for visually-engaging presentations and story-telling. It has a steadily growing user base. Already some of the world’s most prominent organizations are using Wakelet.

Figure 4: Prominent organizations using Wakelet.

Wakelet encourages both the sharing of resources and their joint creation and curation of material. Still, in this area, some more features for cooperation would be desirable. A strict privacy policy combined with a well-engineered support page offering many short videos and helpful articles and a responsible team creates confidence for a long future of this product. And even if there comes a time where other similar products gain prominence, you can save your work via Wakelet’s export feature (JSON and PDF format) and change the web service presumably without too many troubles.

Figure 5: The Wakelet team.

I follow with these text passages the above-quoted “Online Tools for teaching and learning” ↩︎

Advantages of URL shortener

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Citing and visiting web addresses with long URLs is sometimes complicated. Long URLs are particularly a hardness when there are no clickable links but only long strings printed on paper. This article suggests URL shortener to avoid the hurdle mentioned above.

What is a URL Shortener?¹

At first, we need to clarify what an “URL” is. “URL” stands for “Uniform Resource Locator,” and they’re a way of identifying the location of a file on the internet.

A URL is not the same as a domain name! Sometimes these both terms are confused and used interchangeably. But a domain name is just one part of a URL. The image below shows the difference:

Figure 1: Parts of an Uniform Resource Locator (URL)²

Use URL shortener for your references

Depending on the Content Management System (CMS) the website is using you can get very long URLs. There are three types of long URLs:

Long pretty URLs: These URLs consist of understandable text strings. Example: https://www.dbfk.de/media/docs/expertengruppen/pflegemanagement/DBfK-Handreichung-BAG-Pflegemanagement-Anwerbung-auslaendischer-Mitarbeiter_innen.pdf
Long ugly URLs: These URLs include randomly mixed characters, generated automatically by the CMS. Example: https://www.art.com/gallery/id--c23945/decorative-art-prints.htm?ui=6731D67F76A44083AD1B8F110C4FE301.
Long mixed URLs: These URLs contain understandable parts, but these sequences are directed to the CMS and not to humans. Examples are strings for the search engine: https://www.sfgate.com/search/?action=search&firstRequest=1&searchindex=solr&query=%22earthquake+san+francisco%22.

The solution for all these kinds of long URLs is the usage of URL shortener. There is a great variety of URL shortener available. But instead to use the automatic generated short URL (e.g., something like bit.ly/2GIYPa3) use the possibility to edit the URL with an appropriate and memorable word. Although these strings are often longer than the automatically generated short URL, they are much easier to type. Besides, you or other users can even memorize them (e.g., https://bit.ly/url-shortener).

As other users of the service also take memorizable short URLs, sometimes there may be a clash of URLs. If this happens, then you are not allowed to generate this specific URL. To prevent colliding URLs, I use a short prefix referring to me as the author or to the subject/project of the URL (e.g., https://bit.ly/pb-url-shortener).

Summary

You might be thinking that shortening your URL is an extra step, but URL shorteners are very beneficial:

Short URLs are more comfortable to share
Short URLs are essential if there is limited space (e.g., Twitter)
Short URLs are more visually appealing
Short URLs are memorized easier
Short URLs are more straightforward to type when there is only a paper reference
Short URL services can provide additional information such as the number of clicks
Short URLs can be adjusted if the original URL changes, so that users still have the correct links
Short URLs services allow you sometimes to create your brand and categories for your URLs. If they do not provide this service, you can use prefixes to get some rudimentary management for your URLs
Short URLs prevent line breakings (e.g., in emails) so that the user does not have to cut and paste to put the link together

But there is also a disadvantage of URL shortener:² They are often used by spammers to hide the URL destination. That way, unsuspecting people are more likely to click on them.

Wakelet

In addition to the following Wakelet, there is also a community edition on my Wakelet homepage where you can add relevant links.

I took the next two paragraphs from Oberlo and modified them slightly. ↩︎
I took the next two sentences from Oberlo. ↩︎

Archiving Quoted Web Resources

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Quoting web resources is a hassle for several reasons:

Web pages are not available anymore.
Web pages have moved to another URL.
Web pages change their content so that the cited reference is not correct anymore.

Humanities, where detailed content analysis of websites is a popular research method. Referring to exact quotes is a question of reproducibility and therefore crucial in science generally. This article presents some strategies and tools to bypass the challenges mentioned above.

Quote websites with the Wayback Machine

With WebCite, there used to be a web service to circumvent link rot and changed the content. WebCite allowed to archive online resources and returned an URL where these filed pages could be accessed. Besides that this service was often down and therefore notoriously unreliable, as of July 14, 2019, it does not accept any new archive requests anymore.

Figure 1: Start page of the WebCite service, proclaiming that new archiving request are currently not feasible anymore.

Luckily with Wayback Machine¹, operated by the Internet Archive, there is recently a new and reliable web service available. Although there is a sophisticated how-to use of this service in the Wikipedia context, I have prepared my own How-to use Wayback Machine for the general public.

Visit my slides on How-to use Wayback Machine for the general public.

Figure 2: Start page of the Wayback Machine, a service by the Internet Archive

How to cite archived resources?

Internet Archive asked the Modern Language Association (MLA) how to cite resources archived with the Wayback Machine. MLA Style is a prevalent system for documenting sources in scholarly writing.

MLA answered

that there is no established format for resources like the Wayback Machine, but it’s best to err on the side of more information. You should cite the webpage as you would normally, and then give the Wayback Machine information.

MLA also provided an example:

McDonald, R. C. “Basic Canary Care.” Robirda Online. 12 Sept. 2004. 18 Dec. 2006 $$<http://www.robirda.com/cancare.html>$$. Internet Archive. $$ http://web.archive.org/web/20041009202820/http://www.robirda.com/cancare.html$$.

Note there are several additions to a standard bibliography:

Two dates: The first is the date of the archive, then comes the date when the page is retrieved.
Two URLs: The first is the original URL (not available anymore), then comes the archived URL from the Internet Archive.
Web service: Between the two URLs comes the ‘second’ author, the name of the internet service which archived the resource and generated its URL.

According to MLA, both URLs shouldn’t be underlined in the bibliography.

Let’s try another example. The archiving service Peeep.Us is not available anymore. The Wayback Machine gives us as archived URL https://web.archive.org/web/20180813205348/http://peeep.us:80/. If we are are going to compose this bibliography in the usual way, we would get:

Nikolaev, Cyril. “Peeep.Us.” Save Snapshot of a Web Page Forever!, 13 Aug. 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180813205348/http://peeep.us:80/.

Using a name for web sites may questionable, but I use it whenever there is a reasonable possibility (e.g., from the Copyright or from the name of the institution, which produces the web site).

Now we have to add the retrieval date, the original URL and the name of the archiving service:

Nikolaev, Cyril. “Peeep.Us.” Save Snapshot of a Web Page Forever!, 13 Aug. 2018, 22 Jul. 2019 $$<http://peeep.us>$$. Internet Archive. $$<https://web.archive.org/web/20180813205348/http://peeep.us:80/>$$.

Wakelet

In addition to the following Wakelet, there is also a community edition on my Wakelet homepage where you can add relevant links.

To access this page you must be registered by archive.org. ↩︎

Grammarly: A Case Study

Sun, 09 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In another post, I reported on my general experiences with Grammarly. I commented on different use cases, mainly with text pieces from my blog writing. By contrast, this post here focuses on a case study with a literary text piece from a novel.

I have taken the first 5,000 characters of a still unpublished German novel from a friend of mine. For an informed assessment, I am not just going to explain the different steps but will also provide the resulting text documents as attachments.

The different phases of my workflow

I ran the text passage through Google Translate and revised the text with Grammarly in two steps.

Figure 1: Screenshot of Grammarly alerts after Google Translate

Step 1: This is the German original text passage.

Step 2: The text after Google Translate (1 minute). In several passages, it is not understandable, and it feels awkward and clumsy.

Step 3: Working through the text with Grammarly uncritically, e.g., without reading and thinking, only following Grammarly’s alerts (2 minutes). Grammarly comes up with 19 alerts, almost half of them about spelling (5) and punctuation (4). Grammarly does not detect the incomprehensible sentences or clauses.

Step 4: Working through the text with Grammarly thoroughly, e.g., finding (with dict.cc) better suited vocabulary and changing sentence structures where appropriate to get a more correct and lively English (75 minutes).

I believe the final text is much better; even it is still imperfect and flawed. Please keep in mind that I am not an English native speaker.

The essential conclusion I want to draw after this experiment: The resulting text passage is in a quality I would have never achieved without the three tools I mentioned: Google Translate, dict.cc, and Grammarly].

Figure 2: Screenshot of Grammarly plans and pricing

Comments desired!

I would love to get comments from you:

If you are a German native speaker: What do you think about the quality of the result concerning the time needed?
If you are an English native speaker: Would you confirm that the Google Translator text is clumsy and in some passage not understandable? And first and foremost: Is the quality of the final version not all that bad and tolerable?
If you are neither a German nor English native speaker: What do you think about the final result respective to your English language skills? Would you think that Grammarly could improve your English?
And to all of you: Did the final text passage entice you to read more of the book? Should my friend invest 140 bucks to buy the premium version of Grammarly for one year and spend her leisure time to publish her novel?¹

Just a rough calculation: For 5,000 characters I needed all in all about 80 minutes. My friend’s English is better so that she would be possibly faster (and better) in the translation. But let us continue the calculation with 80 minutes. The novel has 450,000 characters = 90 x 5,000 character, i.e., 90 x 80 minutes = 8,100 minutes or 135 hours or 27 working days á 5 hours. ↩︎

Grammarly improves your writing

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

My story with Grammarly

This article reports on my experiences with the premium version of Grammarly, an AI-powered web service for grammar and spell checking. As this is going to be a very positive review, I feel the obligation to publicly disclose that I am not in any way affiliated with Grammarly Inc., the enterprise behind this product.

It was almost exactly one year ago in June 2018 when I learned the first time about Grammarly. I cannot remember anymore, why I stumbled over Grammarly. At first, I used it only with the free plan experimentally for some of my English writing on the web. I have to confess that I was very skeptical about the practical usefulness of this kind of app.

But after some tests, I was surprised about the quality of the suggestions. Grammarly was quite helpful as it gave me not only corrections for words spelled wrongly but also tips and ideas for a better style in English writing. At the same time, Grammarly told me not only how many improvements it has already suggested to me for a specific text passage, but also how many more suggestions would be in the premium version. Clearly enough, this was a sales gimmick, but a well-done one! I became curious about these other recommendations and signed finally up in August 2018 for the Premium version. At that time, it was still US$ 62,98 for a year, but in the meantime, the price has more than doubled (US$ 139,95) for the yearly subscription. I didn’t regret it!

Use cases illustrated by screenshots

Besides spell and grammar, Grammarly also helped me with style issues and even to find the right tone to address a particular audience. As a non-native speaker, it is difficult for me to judge any English improvements. But from reading much English literature, I’ve got the feeling that my English writing has improved tremendously.

I do not intend to write a tutorial for Grammarly, but I will give you some examples of use cases, illustrated by screenshots.

Use case 1: An already published article

I took a lengthy article (about 2.500 words), which I had published two years ago. I copied the markdown formatted text directly into the web interface of Grammarly. This article has a somewhat philosophical flavor so that technical concepts, which Grammarly has not in its dictionary, didn’t play a role. I had the text already cleaned up form spelling errors using RStudio’s spell checker. Nevertheless, Grammarly came up with more than 125 suggestions for improvements. I didn’t think that my English is so bad. How embarrassing!

When I inspected the text in detail, it turned out, that 19 suggested “improvements” weren’t useful, as they addressed quotes from English books by famous people like Michael Polanyi or Ludwig Wittgenstein. Another four recommendations related to markdown formatted text, where corrections would have resulted in syntax errors. But still there remained about 100 helpful tips! Statistically, Grammarly advised me about possible improvements every 25 words. I was shocked, and even a little depressed!

Grammarly suggests and explains a possible improvement

You see on the right top of the screenshot the number of alerts or warnings (= 120). Grammarly suggests finding a more common synonym for “emphatically” and explains with examples why it is maybe not the best choice. As all recommendations didn’t quite fit for my writing intention, I decided to delete this “overly complex” word without a substitution.

Use case 2: German text translated via Google Translate

I transcribed a German interview with Michael Rundel and ran the text through Google Translate. I believe, Google Translate has already overcome its start-up difficulties. Nowadays, I think, its translation is pretty good. But the writing must still be reviewed by a human.

As you can see in the image below, Grammarly recommended after an unpolished Google Translation from German to English a slightly better rate of improvements per word: 1892 words (bottom-left) with 104 tips (top-right) which accounts for one suggestion every 18 words.

Grammarly alerts in a machine-translated text

If you subtract the high number of 37 tips for punctuation issues (third line in the alerts list) – which partly are markdown formatting requirements and partly are differences between American and English punctuation rules – then the ratio improves to 1 tip for every 28 words. Admittedly this calculation is done under the caveat that after Google Translate, one has more sentences to restructure or to reformulate completely. But you can use Grammarly to implement these changes fairly quickly.

This calculation startles. Instead of struggling to formulate an English text from scratch and then to polish it with Grammarly, it appears to be more efficient – at least for me – to use another workflow: Writing my thoughts in a German paper -> than to translate it with Google Translate -> and finally using Grammarly to polish it.

Write the text in German

Translate it with Google Translate

Polish it with Grammarly

Publish it with Bookdown /Blogdown

But this reasoning is not entirely correct: The first version of the English text could already be done with Grammarly and would save one complete phase of the mentioned workflows. At least, I believe, this is valid for technical writing, where writing in English is not so complicated grammatically and therefore faster. But for publications in the Humanities, the workflow with Google Translate would be perhaps the better choice.

Use case 3: Writing English directly with Grammarly

To write text “live” in Grammarly has several advantages:

Grammarly gives you immediately a short explanation for every alert so that you can reformulate or restructure your document instantly.

Grammarly explains every current alert briefly and succinctly

Grammarly offers on-demand also longer clarifications and examples. So you can learn better writing during writing.

If required you can get from Grammarly a more profound explication with examples

Grammarly tutors you about the English language. This educational approach comes in handy when you notice that Grammarly often complains in similar situations. For instance, I didn’t know that there are different punctuation rules in American and British English. As I had written the lengthy text outside of Grammarly, I had to go through the whole article and change all occurrences of wrong punctuations one by one. If I had known these different rules, I would have to use the correct rules already in writing the draft version.

Grammarly offers on some subjects short tutorials

Grammarly supports different kinds of workflows: In the default configuration, Grammarly jumps automatically from one suggestion to the next. It is a good strategy for papers already written in English. But if you are writing directly within Grammarly, it is better to turn off this feature as it destroys the writing flow. Then you can select the recommendation you want to look at individually, and Grammarly jumps to the related text passage. A third option is to work on all tips concerning a specific category (e.g., spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, etc.) As you don’t have to jump from one type of problem to another one, the focus of one category of alerts speeds up the correction.

Working with Grammarly on alerts type ‘Punctuation’

Grammarly opens a window with synonyms when you double click on a word in your text.

Grammarly window to choose from a suggested synonym

Grammarly also offers recommendations to improve your writing style. The following screenshot presents my first try to begin this article. Grammarly analyzed it as a tedious text passage. This example demonstrates that Grammarly is far more than just a garden-variety of a spell or grammatic checker.

Screenshot of a Grammarly window with alert about a boring text passage

Grammarly varies its suggestions according to your writing goals. You can choose your intention, subject domain, target audience, your writing intention, your style (formal/informal), and even about the emotional flavor of your writing. Some of these features are still experimental, and I have to confess that I did not know when to choose what. I assume that my English is not good enough to use these advanced configurations.

Grammarly varies its alerts according to your chosen writing style

Grammarly can seamlessly be integrated via a browser plugin into types of web content (e.g., fora, web editing). But it seems to me that these possibilities are sparse. Yes, there is an add-in for Microsoft Word, but only for Windows. In WordPress, Grammarly does not work with the visual editor, you have instead to use the code editor. Likewise, you can’t use Grammarly with markdown files in RStudio or other text editors. But these shortages are not limitations as you can always write your book or article in the Grammarly cloud and then copy the text into your editor of choice. Grammarly stores your document in short time intervals, so you don’t have to worry to loose parts of your work. You can go back to unfinished articles at a later time and finish it for publication.

My personal desktop in Grammarly

I prefer to work with the browser extension, as it always presents the same user interface. Besides, it unleashes the full power of Grammarly. All screenshots in this post show the Grammarly editor in the browser, Google Chrome, in my case. But there are also plugins for Firefox, Safari, and Edge. All these browser extensions are free, and you can use Grammarly with limited functionality at no charge as well.

Other similar products

Finally, I should add that during the research of this article, I noticed that there are a couple of web services with related functionality available. The high number of recent articles about grammar apps insinuates a big market for this kind of service:

Wrapping up

All in all, I’m delighted with Grammarly. In my opinion, it is a beneficial tool for the non-native writer. It improves your writing for the web (e.g., posting in blogs or commenting in fora) but also for printed papers and books. It has many cute and even some outstanding features. Even with Grammarly, I am still not wholly comfortable to write in English, but at least I am stressed about it anymore.

I do not claim that Grammarly is the best product, as I do not know the other apps and have therefore no comparison. But in most of the reviews mentioned above, Grammarly is top ranked. It is undoubtedly the app with the biggest user base (over 10 Mio.).

Last, but not least, I would like to add that Grammarly is not idiot-proof. You have to make your choices, looking up other dictionaries to find better wording. (I am happy using all the time dict.cc). You have to be aware that even if Grammarly is AI driven, it does not understand your writing in the human sense. If you are writing a dumb and meaningless article, Grammarly cannot improve your reasoning and arguments. I noticed, for instance, that Grammarly sometimes had overlooked a missing word, an error a human would immediately see. And sometimes Grammarly is wrong with its suggestions as the last screenshot demonstrates. But these rare cases are easy to judge and correct.

Grammarly is not idiot-proof. Your own intelligent judgement is still required.

Disqus installation again

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A short personal note on my tutorial on Disqus installation: I have used for my screenshots, not this docdock but the hugo-academic theme. I have changed from docdock to hugo-academic and now (2017-05-31) I am back at docdock again. I will explain the reason for this twofold change in one of my next blog post. I am also planning to update text and screenshots to the new blogdown versions.

Update: 2021-05-19: Almost exactly four years later I’m ruefully back at the Academic theme again.🤭

In my tutorial How to install disqus on Hugo I have used the hugo-academic theme to demonstrate the installation process. The article was one of my first contact with static websites, and I experimented with it at https://portfolio.peter-baumgartner.net.

After some experiences with the academic website, I looked for other themes which are using more prominent the blog function. I came up with this beautiful and very functional hugo-theme-docdock website for documentation. But for the tutorial, I have used a different code for the integration of Disqus proposed by Yihui Xie.

In the meanwhile, Yihui has suggested his approach as a pull request which was accepted by the Hugo team. So I assume that in a new release we will all get this more elaborated disqus integration code in the standard Hugo installation.

Alternatives for Disqus?

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Disqus is a top-rated service for hosting and managing comments. But it has as an external service several disadvantages which opposed the philosophy of static websites diametrically. I discuss some alternatives for integrating discussion fora with static websites.

Disqus has a long list of drawbacks

In one of my tutorials I have explained how to integrate Disqus into your static website. But in this article, I recommend looking for alternative comment services. Why this different standpoint? In the meanwhile, I read several articles questioning Disqus. Here is a list of critiques I found on the web (without ranking):

Disqus is slow and has a bad (re-)loading behavior.
Disqus is tracking many different things for different customers, some of them hidden and unknown.
Disqus does not allow Markdown.
Disqus does not allow anonymous content (IP address, email, and name are recorded).
Disqus is hosted in the USA, which is considered to have less strict privacy laws than Europe.
Disqus is not open source.
Disqus does not allow that users can use free licenses for their comments. It is not clear who has ownership of the comments.
Disqus is one central authority collecting all comments of your website visitors and users on their servers.

A typical request log with Disqus enabled: There are 105 network requests vs. 16 without Disqus. Load-time rises between 2 to 6 seconds.

Especially the first and last bullet points defeat the advantages of a static website: Speed and all content always at your disposal. On a static website, data are just plain text files, saved locally on your hard disk. Therefore you can static sites transfer easily: Compress all your data in one zip file and unzip it where ever you want it. With Disqus, these advantages are not valid anymore because your blog text and its comments are hosted separately on different servers.

What are alternatives for Disqus?

Summarizing the disadvantages, I mentioned above I am looking for a system which is

free
open source
and does not host the user-generated comments centrally

The Hugo page on comments lists six available alternatives for comment on static websites¹. On AlternativeTo you will find 16 systems².

Cursory review on some services

Staticman

Screenshot of Staticman’s website

Staticman is open source and transforms user-generated content into data files to merge in your GitHub repository, along with the rest of your content. This approach seems promising for me, but until now, I couldn’t manage to install it. I have reported my problem, and I am currently waiting for help. As soon as I know how to fix it, I will review the system here on these pages.³

hyothes.is

Screenshot of hypothe.is' website

hypothes.is wants to provide “a conversation layer over the entire web that works everywhere, without needing implementation by any underlying site”. As far as I understand, for this approach, the data has to be stored centrally. So this software again is not an alternative to Disqus. This remark is not a critique of hypothes.is because it belongs to another category of software services. It has a new approach worth reviewing later in more detail.

IntenseDebate

Screenshot of IntenseDebate’s website

IntenseDebate is a feature-rich comment system for many blogging resp. CMS platforms. IntenseDebate is developed by the people who are behind many other well-known software services (e.g., WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, VaultPress, Akismet, Gravatar, to name a few). It seems a bit odd that I could not find newer information on their blog than January 2014⁴. It is free but not open source, but it hosts the content centrally in the US. IntenseDebate is, therefore, no candidate for replacing Disqus.

Graphcomment

Screenshot of Graphcomment’s website

Graphcomment is a beautifully designed commenting service with a (limited) free plan. But it is disqualified under my criteria as the code is not open source and it hosts the comments centrally too.

MUUT

Screenshot of MUUT’s website

MUUT does not allow pre-moderation, e.g. every comment is online immediately. This is an interesting approach, but it is no alternative to Disqus: There is no free plan, and all rights of the user-generated content belong to MUUT!

ISSO

Screenshot of ISSO’s website

ISSO is a lightweight commenting service, programmed in Python, which allows anonymous comments. It is free, open-source, and installed locally. So it does qualify! But the installation procedure seems complex as there is no GUI, and one has to use the terminal for the installation. Furthermore, it seems to me that not all operating systems are covered. But I should give it a try anyway and review it.

Discourse

Screenshot of Discourse’s website

Discourse is a feature-rich open-source environment, supports Markdown and allows anonymous posting. As a hosting service, it has no free plan and costs a minimum of US$ 100 / month (with ~~80%~~ 85% discount for educational resp. 50% for non-profit institutions.). But you can install Discourse yourself without cost on your server. ~~Alternatively, you can pay a one-time fee of US$99 for a cloud installation with a US$10/month hosting fee.~~⁵ With the possibility to install it on your server, Discourse is another candidate to try out.

Using GitHub ()

Screenshot of Gazoo.vrv, Don Williamson’s website

Using GitHub: Another website is also recommending to use GitHub for comments. I have no clear idea how these proposed code lines will work in practice, but if it works, then it will certainly qualify: Open source, free, supporting Markdown and hosted by the website owner.⁶

Summary

I reviewed superficially different commenting systems. I was looking for a free, open source system, allowing anonymous content, Markdown and hosted by the website owner. Four services seem to fulfill my criteria: Staticman, ISSO, Discourse and a code proposal by Don Williamson. hypothes.is is an exciting project, but not a commenting system. It belongs, therefore, to a different category of software (annotation systems).

A competent review of these four systems requires a test installation, which I plan to do in the next few weeks.⁷

Update 2021-05-18: There are now ten services listed. ↩︎
Update 2021-05-18: There are 29 services listed, but not all are open source, and some have already discontinued their service. ↩︎
Update 2021-05-18: Even with some help by the developer I couldn’t manage to integrate it. Seems that my knowledge four years ago wasn’t enough. ↩︎
Update: 2021-05-18: Their blog is not updated anymore, but the main website has recent information, as the footer with copyright 2021 demonstrates. ↩︎
Update 2021-05-18: I adapted the changes of plans. ↩︎
Update: 2021-05-18: Now - four years later - I understand this approach perfectly. There are, in the meanwhile, already a bunch of different services using GitHub. In the new version of this blog, I am using utteranc.es a lightweight comments widget built on GitHub issues. ↩︎
Update 2021-05-18: I have never done these test installations. But at least I have revised this old article. I am still planning to look into details at least of some of these commenting systems. I am using now utteranc.es, and the Academic theme of this blog provides commento, another alternative to Disqus. ↩︎

web-service | Thought splinters

Memento Time Travel

Research with archived web data

How does the Memento API work?

Where to find the desired information?

Contributed Packages

Packages By Name

Packages By Date of Publication

Which page to scrape?

Contributed Packages

Packages By Name

Packages by Date of Publication

Memento protocol in action

Package installation

Mementos Link Types

Memento Craw List

Harvesting Web Pages

Tidy data

Get number of available packages

Visualizing the results

Summary

Wakelet - Share Visually-Engaging Stories

What is a Wakelet?

How do People use Wakelet?

Sharing resources

Portfolio

Raising awareness

Sharing your passion

Education

Wakelet and the SAMR model

Wakelet works seamlessly with various apps

Wakelet is free and always will be

Feature requests

Conclusion

Advantages of URL shortener

What is a URL Shortener?1

Figure 1: Parts of an Uniform Resource Locator (URL)2

Use URL shortener for your references

Summary

Wakelet

Archiving Quoted Web Resources

Quote websites with the Wayback Machine

How to cite archived resources?

Wakelet

Grammarly: A Case Study

The different phases of my workflow

Figure 1: Screenshot of Grammarly alerts after Google Translate

Figure 2: Screenshot of Grammarly plans and pricing

Comments desired!

Grammarly improves your writing

My story with Grammarly

Use cases illustrated by screenshots

Use case 1: An already published article

Use case 2: German text translated via Google Translate

Use case 3: Writing English directly with Grammarly

Other similar products

Wrapping up

Disqus installation again

Alternatives for Disqus?

Disqus has a long list of drawbacks

What are alternatives for Disqus?

Cursory review on some services

Staticman

hyothes.is

IntenseDebate

Graphcomment

MUUT

ISSO

Discourse

Using GitHub ()

Summary

What is a URL Shortener?¹

Figure 1: Parts of an Uniform Resource Locator (URL)²