EvoDevo journal rebranding I saw today that EvoDevo, one of the key journals in the field of evolutionary developmental biology, has been rebranded as Developmental Biology Advances. The announcement frames it in a positive light: This change marks an exciting new chapter, continuing to highlight the integrative research that has defined EvoDevo while expanding the […]
Tag: django
I deposited the codebase that powers EvoDevo Papers on Zenodo. It is now citable: Vellutini, B. C. (2026). EvoDevo Papers: a literature bot for evolutionary developmental biology. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18238617
I’ve released a major update to EvoDevo Papers. The database now has all the papers posted since 2015 and a new search form for swiftly exploring the contents. Full archive In the previous update, I improved the website by creating separate pages for feeds, posts and individual papers to make the database contents accessible to […]
The newest version of EvoDevo Papers is online, and it’s the biggest update since the last codebase refactoring. I’ve made several additions and improvements to the website and implemented cross-posting to Bluesky. Why have a website? For many years, EvoDevo Papers’ posts were only on Twitter. Everything was well—until it wasn’t. When I moved it […]
I took some time this weekend to experiment with just—a modern, make-inspired command runner. I’m interested in using it for managing the routine tasks of the Cifonauta database (a Django-based app), which are currently handled by Fabric. Fabric is a Python library for running shell commands locally or remotely via SSH. I use it for […]
Cifonauta 2.0 went live last week! It’s been almost two years of work since our project to modernize the image database was approved. Link: https://cifonauta.cebimar.usp.br The site now has a responsive interface for mobile devices and a new administrative dashboard for users and curators of the database. Yes! We will gradually open up the database […]
The botsin.space community, a popular Mastodon server for automated accounts (bots), will be retiring soon. They have been kindly hosting EvoDevo Papers for the past couple of years. To avoid any downtime, I recently migrated the account to a new server, the biologists.social community managed by The Company of Biologists. I think it’s a great match, […]
Summary To add data from a ManyToManyField to a SearchVectorField, you can join the related values in a string and pass this string as a Value() expression to the SearchVector object: Cifonauta’s full-text search During the past year, we’ve been working on several updates for modernizing the Cifonauta database. The website now has a fully […]
EvoDevo Papers is a bot that shares research articles in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (or evo-devo). Originally, I created it as a Twitter bot, and everything was going well for years… until Twitter’s takeover. The new policies and API restrictions made it unsustainable to continue posting there. In response to that, I decided […]
I’m refactoring the image processing functions of the Cifonauta database and wondering if there’s any Python library with native video processing capabilities. For the past years, I used a subprocess.call() to run a FFmpeg command to scale down and convert video files for the Cifonauta website (which is Django-powered). The ffmpeg command has some niceties […]