Overview

Computer Science Blogs (csblogs.com) was a project that worked to develop an open source blog aggregation system for computer scientists. Students, academics, and those working in industry could set up a profile and open up their blog to a wider audience.

In 2021, the hosted website and back-end was shut down because we were unable to commit to the time and cost to maintain.

Implementation

The project is free and open source, anyone can contribute or follow progress on the GitHub organisation. We’ve made use of the Node JS runtime and the Express app framework.

Version 1.0 started development in 2015, and in 2016 we released version 2.0, which made significant imrpovements based on knowledge we gained in-between, and JavaScript developments like arrow functions, promises, and async/await. You can read about what we learnt in this blog post.

My involvement

I have been the largest contributor to the project. I have designed the user interface of the site, the branding, and written the pages presented to the user. I also helped find and implement tools for systems like subdomains and form validation.

Home page screenshot The site is completely responsive; fitting to mobile, tablet, and desktop displays

Bloggers page screenshot This page shows a list of computer science bloggers who have their content shown on csblogs.com

Profile page screenshot Each blogger gets their own profile page about them, with links to their social networks, and a feed of just their blog posts

Signup page screenshot A user can sign in with a choice of third-party services (WordPress, GitHub, or Stack Exchange)