Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Release 2.0.29

Today we released BibSonomy 2.0.29 which includes some smaller updates that nevertheless might help you a lot:
  • The tag search now supports the "but not" negation, i.e., you can search for posts that have some tags but not some other tags using the system tag sys:not:TAG. For example, you can get all posts that have the tag folksonomy but not the tag bookmarking by searching for folksonomy+sys:not:bookmarking.
  • Firefox and Chrome add-ons now replace the well-known bookmarklets - you can get them from the buttons page.
  • We included tag autocompletion on some places, including the editTags page and at the quick tag editor in post lists.
  • We made the layout using less space on your screen (reload the page with Shift-F5 to see the effect).
  • The QR code scanner is now also available to post publications.
Furthermore, several internal improvements and bug fixes were released, including
  • an updated Spring framework
  • a new method createReferences for our REST API
  • a more sensitive extraction pattern for the COinS scraper
  • improved QR code scanning and rendering
  • HTML/CSS fixes for touch device
We hope that everything runs smoothly, if you experience any problems, please let us know!

Happy Tagging!
Robert

Friday, October 26, 2012

What happened to the bug trackers and plugin downloads?

Wednesday was the day we scheduled the October release but we did not release a new version. Why?

On Wednesday morning, our administrator noticed an unusual activity on our development server that hosts the revision control system, bug trackers, file releases, etc. He immediately shut the server down and began to investigate what happened. Unfortunately, someone found an exploitable bug in the FusionForge project management system we are using for developing BibSonomy (and also for many other student projects) and managed to break into the system.

Besides further investigating the damage, we are currently setting up a new server that then hosts all the tools we need for development. However, since the bug in FusionForge has not been fixed, yet, we are not able to make the service available outside our network. Hence, until the bug is fixed or we find another solution, the bug trackers will not be available. For the file releases (e.g., JabRef plugin, TeXlipse plugin, etc.) we will find an intermediate solution that hopefully will be set up during the next week.

We will continue with the release next week and be particularly careful when merging changes in the source code. BibSonomy is not affected by the incident, since it is running on another server in another network. Additionally, your data is secured by geographically distributed live backups.

However, if you had previously created an account on our development server (https://gforge.cs.uni-kassel.de/) and have used the password from there on other services, we highly suggest that you change it immediately on the other services, since we can not exclude the possibility that the attacker had access to the password hashes on our development server.

Sorry for the trouble and back to normal: happy tagging!

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Feature of the week: BibSonomy Buttons - Chrome Add-on


Some of you may already know the bookmarklet buttons which you can add to your bookmarks bar to conveniently open up your myBibSonomy page, save bookmarks and publications - all by a single click.

Now recently, by default more recent browsers hide the bookmarks bar or/and don't allow the placement of bookmarklets there. Since the bookmarklets are an important convenience feature for a fast and efficient tagging experience, we've been working on a feature that'll integrate the process of posting to BibSonomy right into your web browser - directly as an Add-on. The first browser to receive such an addon is Google's Chrome.

Upon installation, a BibSonomy button is placed next to your address bar.
And by clicking it four buttons will appear in a menu (see screenshot).

Three of those buttons represent the actions you already know from the old bookmarklets:
  • the first one opens up your myBibSonomy page
  • the next is for posting a bookmark 
  • and the last one for posting a publication.
The fourth button opens a settings menu for the add-on. To further enhance this integration, the extension offers shortcuts - so you even don't have to make a click! Just configure your shortcuts in the settings of the add-on.

If you are a frequent user of Chrome just follow this link to the plugin at the Chrome Web Store and try it for yourself.

Users with any other browser: We are currently developing a similar plugin for several other browser. Next in line is Firefox.


Happy Tagging (now even faster than ever)
Michael

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Feature of the week: Posting by ISBN

Many people store not only paper publications in BibSonomy, but also entire books. You can either submit all necessary information like authors, publisher, title manually, by submitting a bibtex snippet or by submitting only the ISBN of a publication. In this post, we will shed some light on the latter possibility.


The ISSN (red) and the ISBN (green), as given on the backside of an edition of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-0-0-0)

As you can see in the image above, the ISSN and (as is the case most of the time) the ISBN are usually printed on the backside of a book you might want to store in your publication list. The ISSN is meant mainly for series of publications, e.g. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. The ISBN on the contrary is unique for each book or publication. By entering the ISBN in the form provided, BibSonomy will look it up at WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org/) and automatically fill in all the provided data, turning posting publications with an ISBN into child's play.

Screenshot of the BibSonomy "Post Publication" page with the ISBN tab opened
After submitting the ISBN, you instantly get all required data for posting your publication in your personal stream:

The inserted data after submitting the ISBN
Now you can proceed as usual and add tags as well as further suitable information that you think is missing.

Happy posting and (of course) tagging!

Popular Posts