The One Repo blog

The One Repo demo has been given a facelift. Here’s the old version:

And the slimmer, more elegant new version:

Many thanks to Corina Wong for putting together the new UI.

Not a wildly exciting development, but an important one in these times: the One Repo demo, which was previously available under the HTTP protocol (http://onerepo.net/) now also supports the secure variant HTTPS (https://onerepo.net/). This means that your connection is strongly encrypted, and no-one can see what you’re searching for or finding.

That may not seem important — who cares if people can snoop on your searches? But as the Web as a whole moves towards tighter encryption, it’s going to be increasingly important. For example, as part of its drive towards a more secure Web, the Mozilla Foundation announced in April 2015 that they plan to phase out support for non-encrypted web-sites.

The new support for HTTPS keeps the One Repo ahead of the curve.

There is now a One Repo mailing list, hosted by Index Data’s installation of the GNU MailMan software.We’ll use that list (as well as this blog) for announcements. It’s also a good medium for discussions that aren’t associated with a blog-post. Please note that the archives are public.

Subscribe here.

We’ve recently added an interesting new feature to The One Repo’s user interface. Now, any subdomain of the onerepo.net domain can be configured to provide access to a regional, national or subject-based subset of the harvested targets. For example, us.onerepo.net is set up to search only the US-based repositories.

We could equally set up physics.onerepo.net for the union of all physics repositories, for example; or eu.onerepo.net for European repositories.

Continue reading →