Feature of the week: Firefox integration

BibSonomy offers several facilities to retrieve bookmarks and publications from personal or public collections. An example is the fulltext search mentioned earlier in this blog. For everyday work, it is of great use when these facilities are integrated tightly into the usual working environment, e.g. into the accustomed web browser.

As most of BibSonomy's retrieval features can be accessed via a specific URL structure, the built-in keyword replacement mechanism of Mozilla Firefox provides an elegant mechanism for this purpose. To give an example, if you want to search bookmarks or publications inside your own collection that were tagged with a particular tag, you would have to do the following:

1. Create a new bookmark inside Firefox (via the usual Bookmarks > Bookmark Manager facility)
2. Enter the following details:
   

• Name: Search My BibSonomy
• URL: http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/[your_username]/%s
• Keyword: bs
  

Once this is accomplished, the personal collection can be searched directly via the Firefox address bar: Jump to the bar (e.g. by pressing CTRL + L), and type "bs" (i.e. the keyword that you just specified when creating the bookmark), followed by a space-separated list of the tags you would like to search for, e.g.

bs myown 2006

to retrieve all bookmarks and publications tagged with "myown" and "2006".

This method is obviously rather flexible and can be applied analogously to integrate e.g. global fulltext search. For this purpose, the URL in step (2) from above would have to be specified as http://www.bibsonomy.org/search/%s.

In combination with the keyboard shortcut to post a bookmark, a tight integration into Firefox is accomplished that eases every-day publication and bookmark management with BibSonomy.