Back in 2010, I wrote a web application called PMRetract to monitor retraction notices in the PubMed database. It was written primarily as a way for me to explore some technologies: the Ruby web framework Sinatra, MongoDB (hosted at MongoHQ, now Compose) and Heroku, where the app was hosted.
I automated the update process using Rake and the whole thing ran pretty smoothly, in a “set and forget” kind of way for four years or so. However, the first era of PMRetract is over. Heroku have shut down git pushes to their “Bamboo Stack” – which runs applications using Ruby version 1.8.7 – and will shut down the stack on June 16 2015. Currently, I don’t have the time either to update my code for a newer Ruby version or to figure out the (frankly, near-unintelligible) instructions for migration to the newer Cedar stack.
So I figured now was a good time to learn some new skills, deal with a few issues and relaunch PMRetract as something easier to maintain and more portable. Here it is. As all the code is “out there” for viewing, I’ll just add few notes here regarding this latest incarnation.
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