BibSonomy Release 2.0.25

Der BibSonomies,

since yesterday, we're running version 2.0.25 of BibSonomy on our servers. From our point of view, the release went smooth without any noticeable problems; as usual, if you've experienced anything else, we'd be happy to hear from you. Apart from a number of small internal improvements and bug fixes, the following things are contained:

• New export format based on the Citation Style language (CSL)
• Within discussions, particular publications can be referenced (VERY cool feature, we'll explain this in detail soon...)
• Repaired Scrapers (SpringerLink, CiteSeer, WorldCat, Spires IEEEExplorer, PubMed, ScienceDirect)
• Page load speed improvements by compressed CSS files

Of course the new versions of the BibSonomy libraries are also available from our Maven Repository. We hope to support you even better during your daily work with our improved service!

Happy tagging,

  Dominik

Feature of the Week: Document Previews

If you are regularly attaching PDF documents to your publication posts you have probably already seen it: since quite a while BibSonomy renders a preview image for each uploaded document. A large version is shown whenever you hover with the mouse over a link to the document. For one selected document of each post a small preview is also shown in in the post lists of your personal pages, as can be seen in the following screenshot of my publication posts:

The previews on the one hand help you to quickly identify papers where you remember the cover page but not their exact title and on the other hand give you a first glimpse at the document. If you upload the cover photos of books (you can get them, e.g., from WorldCat), you can quickly distinguish books from other types of publications, as their covers are often colorful and diverse from, e.g., journal articles. A click on the small preview image opens the corresponding document.
Originally, we implemented this feature upon request of a computer imaging group for which it was important to upload the images of their documents and quickly access previews of them in BibSonomy.


If you haven't uploaded a document for your post, yet, a default icon is shown in the post lists instead of the preview. A click on that icon ...

... immediately opens a file upload dialog where you can upload a document:

And that's it: you can now download the document whenever and wherever you want. The preview is not shown immediately since it needs some time until it is rendered. Typically, this should take no more than 15 minutes.

Happy uploading!

Feature of the week: Auto-completion when sending resources to friends

I'm sure you all know this - sometimes a particular web resource makes you think of a friend or colleague (let's call her Lisa) and you're thinking "Hey, that's definitely something Lisa MUST see!". In the academic field, a typical example are interesting research papers, or for your friends at home it's the latest XKCD comic. There's different ways to share links - according to this study, of course Facebook is a major player, but still sharing via Email has a noticeable share.

Bu in an ideal world (where everybody has BibSonomy account, of course ;-) ) it's even simpler: When you're posting a resource to BibSonomy, all you need is a tiny tag, and we'll do the rest for you. How does it work? I'm sure you all still know about Stephan's blog post about your BibSonomy inbox, which you can find in the top right corner when being logged in. Now if you want to put something let's say into Lisa's inbox, you simply add the tag

send:lisa

to the resource - just in the same manner as you add any other kind of tag. So far, so good - this works well when you exactly know Lisa's username (easy in this case, OK ;-) ). But in order to support you in sharing resources with your friends, we've implemented a tiny, but useful little helper: Once you start typing send: into the tag entry box, we're suggesting you a set of autocompletions, based on your friends list. In this way, all you need to remember is that Lisa's username starts with an "L" - once her real username pops up as an autocompletion option, you'll recognize it. Here's what it looks like:

Then, you can either click on the suggested tag, or press the TAB key, and you're done. Easy, isn't it? 

Have fun with this little helper, keep on sharing great resources via BibSonomy and first of all of course happy tagging,

  Dominik