Recently I was invited by the journal F1000 Research to review an article about Software Carpentry, a wildly popular programming best-practices teaching workshop. As I sat down to write the review, loathing the highly antiquated and onerous process that peer-review remains to this day, I realized that the publishing model …

Yesterday my laptop (a Macbook Pro) died. It showed the first signs of severe illness 2 days earlier, seemed to recover at first after a lot of agony, but then deteriorated rapidly yesterday morning. This post isn't about a story of data loss, even if that is sadly still more …

Recently, TreeBASE received the following request.

Hello!

I am just beginning to compile a submission.

The data-matrix is no problem. But in your introductory screens I see nothing explicit about the file format to be used for trees. By implication, these too should be in Nexus format, whereas I would …

As creative expression, blogs and other authored web content qualify for copyright protection. Yet, a number of Pelican (a static site and blog generator) themes, including the default notmyidea and the one I am using, do not include configuration variables for displaying copyright, and more importantly, the terms of reuse …

Obviously the site isn't ugly anymore. Well, IMHO anyway. I've switched the site to a Bootstrap3 theme (specifically, the flatly theme of the Bootswatch collection, using the pelican-bootstrap3 theme for, well, Pelican), and have since made a number of fixes and improvements to the Pelican theme code. More are in …

The site is now live on Github pages. Not yet under it's eventual custom URL, very raw, very ugly (yes, I don't at all like the default theme!), and essentially no content.

But that's precisely the point. I'm an advocate of release early, so I should try and walk the …

I am proudly bringing this site to life. It has been created using plain text and Pelican, a static site generator written in Python. Yes, Python.