Release 2.0.14

Today was the monthly release of BibSonomy. Next to small fixes, this release includes several efficiency improvements e.g.,

• an overhaul of several pages reducing the amount of data and
  
• a compression (gzip) of all content BibSonomy sends to your browser.

With the new release we also introduce two new features that we will discuss in greater detail in the upcoming "Feature of the week" posts.

• BibSonomy goes mobile: We added a new design specifically for browsers on mobile devices (like smart phones or tablets). The new scheme reduces the amount of information on a page, emphasising the core informations of each page and making BibSonomy fun to use even on small displays.
  
• BibSonomy now has experimental support for content negotiation using the HTTP "Accept" header. Depending on the value of the header, the client is redirected to a view with the specific content-type. Supported formats are "application/rdf+xml", "text/csv", "application/json", and "text/x-bibtex".

As always, get back to us with any kind of feedback and enjoy the new features.
Happy tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Use the RSS/Copy Link

As you might already know, BibSonomy features a nice RSS feed for posts, i.e., bookmarks and publications.

An exemplary snapshot of the bookmarks looks like this:


Now, using the copy link you can directly copy entries to your personal posts.


The post can then be edited as usual:


Happy copying (and tagging)!
Martin

Feature of the Week: Optimize your Firefox Browser for BibSonomy

How often do you use the search box of BibSonomy?

You can speed up searching in BibSonomy considerably by creating some
smart keywords in your Firefox webbrowser.
Afterwards, you can access all your posts with a certain tag with just some keystrokes. This blog post explains how to do this.

First try: Speed up fulltext search

1. Navigate to www.bibsonomy.org.
2. Right-click on the BibSonomy search box that says fulltext search here. Select Add a Keyword for this Search...
   
3. In the dialog that appears, enter a short keyword, e.g., bs (like BibSonomy search).
   
   
4. Fill the remaining fields and click Save.

Now you can search in BibSonomy by entering into your browser's location bar (reach it quickly with CTRL + L) the string bs SEARCHTERM, e.g., bs firefox and pressing ENTER. Firefox will then search for the term SEARCHTERM in BibSonomy, e.g., bs firefox opens www.bibsonomy.org/search/firefox.

Next steps: Add more keywords

Adding smart keywords for other search options in BibSonomy is now easy: just select the corresponding option in the dropdown box

and repeat the steps above with a new keyword. Here are some suggestions:

bt

search for a tag (e.g., /tag/firefox)

ba

search for an author (e.g., /author/Stumme)

bm

search for one of your tags (e.g. /user/jaeschke/myown). This is explained in the next step.

Finally: Quickly access your own posts

Adding a smart keyword to access your posts having a certain tag is now straightforward: go to your BibSonomy page and right-click into the enter tag(s) here field at the top. Again, select Add a Keyword for this Search...

and enter an appropriate keyword (e.g., bm for my tags).

Here I describe a more advanced method that searches for concepts instead of tags. Note that this works even if you don't have relations defined, yet!

1. Go to www.bibsonomy.org/concept/user/jaeschke/arbitrary_tag and exchange the user name in the URL by your user name, e.g., replace "jaeschke" by your user name. Press ENTER.
2. Right-Click in the input box containing the string arbitrary_tag and select Add a Keyword for this Search...:
   
   
   
   
3. Again, enter a smart keyword (I would suggest to use bm as described above.).
4. Search for your posts by entering bm TAGNAME into the location bar of your browser (remember CTRL-C).

Nothing new so far, except for the somehow difficult to access concept search field. But what are the benefits of /concept/user/jaeschke/programming compared to /user/jaeschke/programming? Well, I have created some relations using the tag editor of BibSonomy. One of them says that the tags ada, c, fortran, java, lisp, perl, python, and ruby are sub-tags of the tag (or better concept) programming:

Now, whenever I search for /concept/user/jaeschke/programming, I get all posts having the tag programming or one of its sub-tags, i.e., ada, c, fortran, java, lisp, perl, python, or ruby.

This way I can structure my tag space - and more important - use a logical OR in my queries.

More information about concepts and relations can be found here:

• BibSonomy Help: URL Scheme Semantics
• BibSonomy Help: Relations
• BibSonomy Blog: Relations
• BibSonomy Blog: Relations (revisited)
• BibSonomy Blog: Retrieve resources by disjunction of tags

Feature of the Week: Hidden System Tags

System tags are an easy means to facilitate your work with BibSonomy. Simply tagging a post with such a tag allows for example to forward that post to friends (send:xyz) or to a group (for:xyz), to mark the post as authored by yourself (myown) or to mark it relevant for a group (sys:relevantFor:xyz).
Until recently, heavy use of system tags would have caused such tags to appear in your post lists and in your tag cloud - often larger than other tags due to frequent use. We believe, that tag clouds should represent you and your interests rather than your habits. Therefore, several system tags are now hidden from both, tag cloud and post lists. As an example see the two tag clouds below.

The first one is the old version where no system tags are hidden, while the second one is what the cloud currently looks like. In the new cloud, the system tags

• sent:anton (indicating that posts were sent to user anton) and
• sys:relevantFor:kde (meaning a that posts were marked relevant for the group kde)

are hidden while the system tag myown appears in both clouds. Note, that the latter tag is not hidden since it not only makes posts appear on your CV page, but contains information about you as an author, which can be of relevance to you and other users as well. The other two tags simply provide functionality but are not informative as such. They have therefore been classified as hidden system tags.
In post lists (like on the home page or user post lists) hidden system tags are generally not displayed. However, on your own posts - if tagged with hidden system tags - you will find a small cog wheel symbol like here:

Hover with the mouse over the symbol and the system tags of that post will appear. Hidden system tags are also visible to you during any kind of post editing. Thus the functionality of such tags is ensured and stays transparent.

Happy (system) tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Password Buddies

Lately, we've been working hard to improve BibSonomy's social features. With the recent release we introduced another unique feature that was not announced until now. Following the intuition that secrets are always shared among best friends, our idea is to connect you to people who have the same login password for BibSonomy as you.
This is an outstanding feature that other social networking sites lack up to now - usually, you only get buddies recommended by some black-box algorithm. Our solution is more targeted towards the idea that great minds think alike, and hence choose the same password.
So if you have the same password as other users in BibSonomy, you'll see them in the sidebar in the new "your password buddies" section:

Just have a look at your personal page to get to know your possible new buddies.

Please note that it is possible that some of your password buddies have another password than you because of the possible hash collisions of the MD5 algorithm. Unfortunately we can not solve this issue because we don't store the plain text password, but we are working on an extension of the MD5 algorithm that produces no collisions.

Happy secret sharing!
Your BibSonomy team