Introducing Damasus

Hah! That’ll teach me to say “I don’t suffer from Asthma, I enjoy it.” My asthma attack has continued and my chest now feels like someone has been giving it a solid kicking. I have an inhaler but it only lasts two hours and I can only take it every four. I can’t sleep because lying down is no good at all for me, so I’ll been up most of the night. This has given me some free time. The result is Damasus.

Damasus is a site I’ve created to prove a concept. The concept I want to prove is “Isn’t RSS a potentially amazing thing?” I know that people reading this have differing levels of technoabilty so RSS mavens should skip the next paragraph.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Effectively it’s text from a webpage forced into a standard template. This template means that any computer should be able to read it fairly easily and do interesting stuff with the information. It can also include useful data like when the entry was written. This means that computer checking an RSS newsfeed can tell you what’s new, rather than have you waste your time going there and finding out yourself that nothing new is up.

Damasus scans the RSS feeds of various journals and then displays what it finds with the newest items at the front. The abstracts are stored in the database so if it was left running for a few years you’d have a search engine for all of those journals. Once you find something you like click on the title and you’re off to the original site.

At the moment just because articles are linked to, it doesn’t necessairly mean you can read them. Most feeds are derived from two sites, FindArticles, which are free to read and Ingenta Connect, which are not. When time is available I’ll sit down and provide a method of highlighting the Open Access articles.

Currently Damasus is not utterly useful. I’m doubtful it will become so in the near future. What it does show that RSS isn’t a gimmick but could actually be a useful tool if it was adopted as a standard by the scholarly community. A great as the American Journal of Archaeology is, it’d be even greater if there was an easy way pick up the abstracts for the latest articles.

For now I’ll leave it running to see what it does. If anyone knows of a relevant RSS feed they’d like added then comment below and I’ll do my best to add it. You can find the site via a short cut at http://damasus.archaeoastronomy.co.uk/.

Damasus, if you’re wondering, is the patron saint of classicists and archaeologists.