New BibSonomy release online

In this blog, we usually announce new features of BibSonomy, as we're working steadily on improving our service. Some improvements are more visible, others not so much - e.g. when we optimize things in the code or server infrastructure. The latter is what we have been concerned with in the last weeks - we've continued to migrate old parts of the code into our new web application framework, fixed bugs, refactored some parts of the code, and so on.

Yesterday (Monday, 23rd of Feb 2009) we've released a major part of these "background improvements" - in the optimal case, you actually shouldn't notice a lot of it (except that our service has become faster and more reliable). But as we as developers usually become a bit "system-blind", we'd be grateful for any kind of feedback in case you encounter anomalies or irregularities during your daily work with bibsonomy.org.

More specifically, the following pages / functionalities were touched during the release:

• Basket (http://www.bibsonomy.org/basket)
• Layout filters (e.g, http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/din1505/)
• BibTex Detail pages (e.g, http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2862a7a0fab09d8ee50adbd9c4bdb064d)
• in-place editing of tags
• deletion of user accounts (via settings page)
• JSON-output (e.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org/json/user/dbenz)
• XML output of REST API

In any case we hope to have made better the service for you - and thanks in advance for any kind of feedback! Best regards,
Dominik

Feature of the week: BibSonomy-Plugin for JabRef released!

JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager, based (like BibSonomy) on the BibTeX-format. Starting with version 2.4b1, JabRef can be extended using a plugin system based on the Java Plugin Framework (JPF). We have been asked many times how the advantages of a local client like JabRef and a web-based platform like BibSonomy could be combined - now we think we found a nice solution: We built a BibSonomy-Plugin for JabRef!

This plugin enables you to

• fetch publication entries directly from BibSonomy,
• upload publications into your personal account at BibSonomy and
  
• delete entries from your collection.

All of the above integrates seamlessly into the usual workflow of JabRef - this means you don't have to visit the BibSonomy webinterface during the whole process. In order to use plugin, you need of course a BibSonomy account. Once you have that, you can follow these simple steps to experience the synergies of JabRef and BibSonomy:

1. Download JabRef: http://jabref.sourceforge.net/download.php
2. Download our BibSonomy-Plugin;
3. Put the Plugin jar-file into a sub-folder called plugins in your JabRef installation directory
   
4. Start JabRef and you can start working with the Plugin!
   

We've also created an extensive documentation of the plugin, along with a detailed description of each of its functionalities and the setup steps.

Please note: Right after releasing our API, we also presented a prototype of a customized JabRef-Client which allowed up- and downloading of entries (see e.g. this post). With the release of the plugin described above, we stop the further development of this customized client. If you are using it, we highly recommend to migrate to a newer JabRef version, combined with our plugin - it contains bugfixes and improved functionality. You will like it :)

We hope this plugin enables you to get the most out of BibSonomy and JabRef - some example tasks which are now easy are:

1. Download your complete BibSonomy collection into JabRef, use its built-in bibtex-key generator to unify the bibtex keys of your publicatons, and upload all entries again
2. Download your complete BibSonomy collection into JabRef and perform integrity checks on it (missing fields,...), and upload all entries again
3. Use JabRef's web search facility to import entries (e.g, from PubMed), edit them locally to your needs, and bulk-upload them to BibSonomy
4. ...

Enjoy,
Dominik

Feature Summary of the Week

If you have trouble overseeing the large list of features that were
implemented in BibSonomy recently, have a look at the Semantic Web Blog. It summarizes nicely our last activities. Have fun!