Welcome to the first post of the new ESMira Blog. In this introductory installment, I will introduce this blog as a whole, explain our rationale for starting it, and talk about our plans for it going forward.

Why we Started this Blog

ESMira’s development began in 2019, with the public GitHub repository being created in 2021. Even after making ESMira public it wasn’t well known, and to our knowledge our instance was the only one for a while. Even when the first other instances hosted by other researchers came online, we know the involved individuals personally. During that time it was easy to coordinate, and communicate information like relevant changes to ESMira. However, especially since ESMira was introduced in its own paper (Lewetz & Stieger, 20241), we have started noticing more and more servers we did not know of. And we realized that we needed more than just the patch notes to keep users informed about changes, new features, and other things happening with and around ESMira. This is what this blog is for. So if you came here from an ESMira server (especially one we don’t know about yet), welcome!

Where this Blog is Going

What we are planning is to use this blog for long-form informational posts. Chances are you came to this blog via a link in your ESMira admin panel. As I am writing this, those links don’t exist yet, but that’s what we are planning, and that’s the second piece of the puzzle. To keep ESMira users updated, we are planning to include an overview of recent blog post titles right in the ESMira admin panel. That way we can inform even those researchers we don’t personally know about important things like new features where they will read it. Those interested may then read the full post here, where we have enough space to write about these topics in detail. Furthermore, while the admin panel will probably only show the most recent post titles, this site also serves as a persistent archive of all the information posted here.

As I’ve mentioned them a few times already, it comes to no surprise that our main intention for this blog, for now, is to communicate new features that we introduce in ESMira. For more complex features we also want to use these posts to show how-tos on how these features can be used. Depending on our resources, we might even post tutorials for certain use-cases. Apart from that, ESMira is a research tool, and we might even be interested in posting research highlights of studies using ESMira. For now, these are all just ideas, and we see what the future will bring.

How to get Involved

ESMira is open-source software, and so is this blog. The blog is hosted via GitHub pages, and the source code is part of a special branch of ESMira’s main repository. The blog page itself is created via a static site generator running via GitHub Actions. All that this means is that it is rather easy to contribute posts to the blog via GitHub’s Pull Request system2. Or, if you have a suggestion for a post, you can post that in the Discussions in the ESMira GitHub repository. Other than that, we are also happy if you just read these post and do interesting things with ESMira.

Until next time.


  1. Lewetz, D., & Stieger, S. (2023). ESMira: A decentralized open-source application for collecting experience sampling data. Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02194-2 

  2. Maybe we’ll post a tutorial about how to do that at some point.