Feature of the week: Localized Date Information

This week I'll describe a rather small, but nevertheless important new feature. Some of you might never have noticed that the date of publications was rendered in many different ways - namely as it was given by the corresponding user who entered the publication meta information into BibSonomy.

With BibSonomy's last release we made some efforts to consolidate the representation of dates in publications. Some heuristics are applied for parsing as many different given date formats as possible. This allows us to render the corresponding date strings according to a consistent date format - especially depending on the logged in user's language settings.

Happy Tagging -- and stay tuned for the upcoming new release 2.0.16!

.folke

Feature of the Week: Posting to BibSonomy by Gesture with Android & Dolphin Browser

Because we're still so proud of our mobile version of BibSonomy, this week's feature of the week is about how to ease the process of creating a bookmark or publication post via your Android mobile device.

Because typing lengthy texts and especially URLs is always a bit tedious on small screens and keyboards, the popular browser Dolphin HD offers the possibility of navigation by gestures. These gestures are simple figures drawn directly on the screen, which can be associated with a variety of actions. And here's a step-by-step manual how this mechanism can be used for creating new boomark of publication posts:

• After opening the Dolphin Browser, tip on the gesture icon in the lower left corner, and then on the little cogwheel in the lower right corner to create a new gesture:

• Choose "New Gesture" and select as action "Load URL" (first row) and paste the postBookmark- or postPublication-URL (see below) into the input field.
• Choose a simple and memorable gesture (I chose e.g. a "B-like" gesture to post bookmarks, and a "P-like" one to post publications).
• When you're navigating on an interesting page, just tip the gesture button in the lower right, do the corresponding gesture and you'll end up directly in the correct dialogue of BibSonomy (after logging in, of course):

Of course this is just one possibility to achieve this goal - if you have further best practices, we'd be happy to share them with you. In any case happy gesturing and tagging,

Dominik

postBookmark URL:

<br>javascript:location.href='http://www.bibsonomy.org/ShowBookmarkEntry?c=b&jump=yes&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&description='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&extended='+encodeURIComponent(window.getSelection())<br>

postPublication URL:

javascript:location.href='http://www.bibsonomy.org/BibtexHandler?requTask=upload&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&description='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&selection='+encodeURIComponent(window.getSelection())

BibSonomy's Downtime, Finally!

Since this day's noon BibSonomy is running in normal operation again. As we already said, the downtime was caused by a power outage in our neighborhood.

We try our very best to ensure 24/7 operation and we truly are aware of our responsibility. For handling power outages, we already distributed our server load over two independent UPSs (uninterrupted power supplies). A separately installed process monitors all our vital services and sends out pager messages to all responsible BibSonomy team members. The same was true last night - and accordingly our system administrator was on-site short after the power outage occurred. But their was nothing he could do, as the power outage lasted two long for our university's Internet main routers.

Until noon there were still issues connected with wrongly configured routers due to the blackout. But during the last few hours we monitored our systems and are now sure that everything is back to normal. For managing longer power outages in future we installed another UPS. Some permanently installed switches remain to be connected to the new UPS by a technician who already is scheduled.

As a consequence of this downtime which lasted way too long we enforce our activities in distributing BibSonomy's installation across two geographically independent locations. We hope that we didn't cause too many problems and we are really sorry for all inconveniences!

Keep on tagging!

.folke

BibSonomy's Downtime - Update

Hi everybody,

we are still working to get BibSonomy up and running again.
We have experienced a long power blackout in the neighborhood yesterday and systems are only slowly coming back on - we're heavily working on that.
More updates as soon as the situation is resolved.

We'll be back!
Stephan

BibSonomy's Downtime, 15.6.2011

Dear Tagging-Friends,

despite our efforts to ensure BibSonomy's reliable 24h service quality we are faced with an unscheduled downtime of our university's internet uplink. We hope that our technicians will fix the problem within the next hours.

We will write more on this issue tomorrow...

Stay tuned!


.folke

Feature of the Week: Sort your Post Lists

The creation and export of publication lists has always been a core feature of BibSonomy. Using tags is an easy means to select publications for a list. Yet depending on the application, not only the selection of publications but also their order might be of importance. The latter can be controlled using the two URL parameters sortPage and sortPageOrder.
Here is an example: The URL
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social
returns a list of all posts of the user sdo with the tag social. Using the additional parameters sortPage=author and sortPageOrder=asc in the URL
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social?sortPage=author&sortPageOrder=asc
will yield that same list, ordered by the family names of the first authors in ascending order.

The parameter sortPageOrder has exactly two options: asc for ascending order and desc for the converse.
With the last release we added new options to the parameter sortPage. Thus one can now choose from: year, month, day, author, editor, entrytype, title, booktitle, journal, school and date.
All but the last one refer to fields of the according BibTeX entries of the posts. The option date however yields a list ordered by posting date -- the date of the post's (not the publication's) creation. The date option is the only one, that also concerns bookmark posts.

It is easily possible to combine different options using "|". For example will
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social?sortPage=year|month|day&sortPageOrder=desc
return a list where publication posts are ordered by their publication date (given in the BibTeX fields year, month and day).

Happy tagging!
Stephan