On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 03:21:52PM +0000, Greg Wilson wrote: > We've been talking on and off for a couple of years about a lesson > on "publishing in the 21st century". Should creating a personal/lab > website be part of that?
I have quite some reservations about website as a means of publication. If the content is mainly human readable text (such as a paper, technical report or similar), it's better to publish it in that format. If it's any kind of software, a web UI is quite a nightmare in terms of usability and reproducibility. Repeating the painful history of web interfaces to tools such as BLAST (projects like BioPython used to parse content out of HTML responses, and contributors / maintainers had to track any changes that made to the presentation tier of the NCBI (or other) BLAST server) should be avoided as much as possible. Another issue to consider is that people will try to "hack into" any site. There are alternatives for provisioning software in a "ready to use" form. Virtual machine images are a perhaps more classical form that may be considered somewhat "heavyweight" in terms of effort involved to create and to run them, while systems such as Docker or Anaconda are more "lightweight" but may be considered unnecessarily / undesirably dependent on companies behind them. However, they all seem substantially preferable to web sites / applications as a way of publishing scientific software to me. Best regards, Jan > Cheers, > Greg > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org -- +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ | email: [email protected] | | WWW: http://www.jtkim.dreamhosters.com/ | *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----* _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
