Building an academic publications plug-in for Micro.Blog with the help of ChatGPT

I’ve always thought that professors and researchers are an ideal target market for Micro.Blog. Many scholars have personal web sites, but they are often woefully out of date. I thought a plug-in that automatically updated academic publication listings could be helpful, but after a little research, I figured out that Google Scholar doesn’t have an API. I dropped the idea.

Last week, I was thinking about this project again and asked ChatGPT how to “pull information off of Google Scholar” to publish on a personal web site. After a couple of questions back and forth about how I was hosting my site and what I wanted to accomplish, it recommended pulling from ORCID instead. ORCID is basically a unique common identifier and profile for scholars and researchers and is often required when you submit articles to publications. Since Google Scholar doesn’t have an API, ORCID was the next best thing. Before I knew it, ChatGPT was providing instructions for creating a new shortcode template for Micro.Blog.

Some background… It hasn’t been part of my day-to-day job for a very long time, but I’m comfortable with HTML and CSS. I’ve played around with some programming, mostly Python. I’ve customized themes for Micro.Blog, and looked at the Hugo templating language to see what it would take to build my own theme. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on any of this, but I did understand the code I was looking at. Also, as a University of South Carolina graduate student, I have free access to ChatGPT. So my choice of chatbot is less a matter of philosophy and more a matter of convenience.

I started by building something that would just work on my site. ChatGPT navigated the API documentation for Micro.Blog and ORCID. After some back and forth, I got it working. ChatGPT eventually recommended that we supplement the information on ORCID with metadata from CrossRef. The CSS was a little strange, so I had to manually adjust it. Once everything was stable, I asked it to walk me through the process of building a plug-in for Micro.Blog. I fired up BBEdit and GitHub. Within a few minutes, I had a working version of the plug-in. You can see the plug-in, Academia, in action on my new Publications page.1 I plan to make some refinements, make an icon, test the plug-in with some different themes, and then make it available to others. I honestly don’t know how many people would take advantage of the plug-in, but I’m excited that I was able to build it.

I’ve been an LLM skeptic, concerned about the environmental impacts of the technology and the implications for creators.2 But after playing around with this plug-in project off and on for the last couple of weeks, I completely understand why programmers view AI-assisted coding as revolutionary. I was able to build something quickly that I’d been wanting to build for a while. In the hands of a skilled programmer, I can’t imagine how powerful AI-assisted programming could be.

Look for more updates on Academia soon.

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

  1. I replaced my CV/resume in the menu with the new Publications page. ↩︎

  2. And I’m still concerned. The costs of this new technology is high. ↩︎

Long Posts