34.1044, New Features: EasyAbs

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1044. Tue Mar 28 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1044, New Features: EasyAbs

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Lauren Perkins
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Joshua Sims, Daniel Swanson, Matthew Fort, Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Zackary Leech, Lynzie Coburn
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

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Editor for this issue: Daniel Swanson <daniel at linguistlist.org>
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Date: 
From: Daniel Swanson [daniel at linguistlist.org]
Subject: New Features: EasyAbs


Greetings, Linguists of the Future!

(Since everyone reading this exists in the future relative to the me
that is writing this (except, of course, the me that is writing this,
who is in the present).)

I am writing to you as a web developer for Linguist List to tell you
about one of our recent endeavors in support of linguistics on the
interwebs: EasyAbs (easyabs.linguistlist.org)!

Of course, EasyAbs has been around for many years and has served many
of you in your conference-organizing endeavors, so why, you might ask,
am I announcing EasyAbs as if it were new? Because in fact at this
moment there are TWO EasyAbses.

When I joined the Linguist List team last fall, I inherited a project
in transition. Right now, we are maintaining two different websites
which present our data: old.linguistlist.org and linguistlist.org.
Now, it happens that running two sites is more than twice as hard as
running one, because in addition to all the things that might go wrong
on each one individually, you also have to worry about what might go
wrong in the communication between them. Thus, whenever I'm not
providing tech support to someone who has a problem, my job is to
making the new site have all the features that the old one did so that
we can turn off the old site and focus on giving you all a single
excellent browsing experience rather than dividing our attention
between two systems to the detriment of both.

What does all this have to do with EasyAbs? Well, over Thanksgiving
break, while I was at my parents' house with not much to do (I
happened to have a break which started several days before anyone
else's), I set myself the task of redesigning EasyAbs using everything
I've learned about making systems simple, secure, robust, and fast in
the nearly 13 years I've been programming. (And yes, that's a fairly
normal break for me - I can be a little obsessive about coding.)

And now this simplicity means that I can read all the code for the new
EasyAbs in about 20 minutes where the old version would take me most
of an afternoon. This means that there are a lot fewer places where
things can go wrong, which translates into a lot fewer things actually
going wrong (the old system broke multiple times while I was setting
up the new one). It also means that adding new features is really
easy, so if there's something you wish an abstract submission and
management platform could do, please let me know at
webdev at linguistlist.org.

If you're hosting a conference in the near future, consider handling
submissions through easyabs.linguistlist.org, and if EasyAbs or any of
the other work that we do has benefited you, please consider making a
donation at funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate.

Daniel



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