Feature of the week: Share new BibSonomy posts on Twitter

A while ago we were asked on Twitter about a Twitter integration for BibSonomy (by the way follow @BibSonomyCrew on Twitter for the latest updates on BibSonomy). Currently we are not supporting direct posting of tweets e. g. when you add a new bookmark to your collection.
But since it is Christmas time and BibSonomyCrew has been nice all year, we got this new feature from the combination of two great third party services (IFTTT and Yahoo! Pipes) without having to implement anything in BibSonomy. And the best part is, it is really easy to set up. So give it a try!

Here we give you a short manual to do that. IFTTT is short for "If This Then That" and is a free service that connects different channels like Facebook, Evernote, Dropbox with each other using so called recipes. We will use it to turn BibSonomy posts into tweets. For those of you already using IFTTT: You only need the RSS feed of your BibSonomy page, this short pipe on Yahoo! Pipes that converts your tags to hashtags and this recipe on IFTTT.

If you are new to this service just follow theses few steps:

1. Create and activate an IFTTT account at http://ifttt.com. It is free!
2. Activate your Twitter channel for IFTTT on https://ifttt.com/twitter:
    
   After clicking the activate button you will be redirected to Twitter for authorization of the IFTTT app. (Twitter will ask you for your credentials if you are not logged in).
3. Find the recipe "BibSonomy > Twitter with HashTags". This is a complete recipe, you will just have to adapt it to use your BibSonomy user name.
4. Switch the trigger to point to your user page. The trigger is a URL that points to a Yahoo! Pipe with an RSS-Feed of your BibSonomy page as a parameter (we'll explain about the Yahoo! Pipes further below): http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?Feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bibsonomy.org%2Frss%2Fuser%2FbibsonomyCrew&_id=3e1b7b8578783d291e1c7edb6a9d8198&_render=rss Right now the linked RSS-Feed is the bookmark feed http://www.bibsonomy.org/rss/user/bibsonomyCrew of the user page of bibsonomyCrew. Substitute bibsonomyCrew for your own BibSonomy user name.

5. Customize your tweets by modifying the field "Whats happening?". The default tweet to one of your posts will display its title, the corresponding URL (to the post) and its tags. 
6. Use the Recipe. Just click the big button ;-)
7. Post a bookmark to BibSonomy. And now you have posted a tweet about your new bookmark or publication:
   
   IFTTT checks your feed every 15 minutes, thus is can take a short while for your posts to be tweeted. 
8. Enable a second recipe for your publications. The above procedure will tweet your new bookmarks, as we have specified in the trigger, that it passes the bookmark feed of you user page to the Yahoo! pipe. To use the publication feed go through steps 3 through 6 again. This time replace in the URL in step 4 the user name with your own and the first occurrence of rss by publrss. Thus the URL will now point to the RSS feed of the publications on your user page.

Create your recipe on IFTTT! Creating your own recipes is fairly easy. To get tweets from other BibSonomy resource lists, simply go to the according page and get its RSS feed. Just add /rss for bookmarks or /publrss for publications after the domain. For example the RSS feeds for the page http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/nosebrain are http://www.bibsonomy.org/rss/user/nosebrain and http://www.bibsonomy.org/publrss/user/nosebrain. Alternatively just copy these links from the menu that you can find on every resource page:

As mentioned above we use a Yahoo! Pipe to turn the BibSonomy tags into twitter hashtags ("tag" to "#tag"). You can use that pipe for other BibSonomy RSS-Feeds by pasting the feed's address to the "BibSonomyFeedUrl" text field and clicking "Run Pipe" to see the results. After the pipe was executed successfully copy the address from the "Get as RSS" link:


Again copy this recipe from our BibSonomy account on IFTTT and change the URL to your RSS feed address (the trigger like described in 4).

Merry tweeting and tagging
Daniel

P. S. IFTTT has also an app.net channel. If you want to use this service instead of Twitter just use the appropriate channel.

Google+ Community and New Release

We now have  a Google+ Community for BibSonomy to keep you updated about changes and new features. In particular, we will present and discuss planned features in the community. So if you are interested in first-hand updates on what's going on "behind the scenes", just join the community!

And, by the way, today we released a new (intermediate) version of BibSonomy that was mainly thought as a bugfix release but also includes some new interesting features:

• We removed the </br> from the Chicago and the APA layout
• We removed user name case sensitivity in some methods in the REST API
• Changes for the scrapers:
  • OpenUniversity (new)
  • AAAIScraper (new)
  • IEEEXploreBookScraper (fixed)
  • JStorScraper (fixed)
  • MetapressScraper (fixed)
  • NatureScraper (fixed)
  • PubMedScraper (fixed)
  • SpringerLinkScraper (fixed)
  • TaylorAndFrancisScraper (fixed)
• extended and overhauled batch edit page (you can now normalize your BibTeX keys!)
• cleaned up publication details page (different citation styles accessible using tabs)
• removed text area resizer (most browsers now have built-in support for this)
• fixed publication field completion (annoying bug from upgrading jQuery UI)
• moved references of community posts into tab (= less cluttered page)

Happy tagging!

Feature of the week: Add publication lists to your WordPress Blog

WordPress is the most popular blog system in use on the web. Now we have established a convenient way to combine BibSonomy with WordPress.

With our new Plugin BibSonomy CSL you can add a list of publications from BibSonomy to your blog posts. You can style your bibliography with CSL Stylesheets (Citation Style Language). For this you can choose from a set of pre-installed styles, or you can choose a custom style from the web. Additional you have a possibility to add your BibSonomy Tag Cloud on your blog.

To install BibSonomy CSL, log into your WordPress installation as an administrator and search in the plugin install menu for BibSonomy CSL.

Install the BibSonomy CSL and BibSonomy Tag Cloud Widget in the install menu. (Alternatively you can download the plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bibsonomy-csl/, and unzip it and upload it by using a FTP client).

After the installation is complete, you will find in the settings menu the new item BibSonomy CSL. Click it and enter your BibSonomy user name and the BibSonomy API key. Save the settings.

Now you can create a new blog post or a new static page in the usual way. At the bottom you find a new Meta Box called Add BibSonomy Publications.

You can choose between user, group or viewable to select the content from BibSonomy. Detailed information about the scheme you can find at http://www.bibsonomy.org/help_en/URL%20Scheme%20Semantics.

Ok, let's go through an example: Assume, you wanna publish your own publications in a blog post (and in BibSonomy all own publications are tagged with myown). Choose user as content source type and enter your BibSonomy user name as content type value. Now you have to filter your selection by using the tag myown. For this, enter myown in the input field for tags. If you want to select more than one tag you have to separate them by a space character. Optionally, you can limit the number of publications.

Now you can choose one of the pre-installed citation styles, to layout your publication list. If your desired CSL style isn't contained in the default selection, then you can select a custom style, by entering the url of the stylesheet. The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies. A large list of free available styles can be found on http://www.zotero.org/styles/.

To manipulate the look and feel you can customize the CSS. An example is set by default. If you don't like it, simply delete it.

Save your post and take a preview. If it's necessary you can customize your settings or CSS definitions.

Warning: Be aware, that you are using your own account to retrieve the posts from BibSonomy. That means, that all posts, that are visible to you in BibSonomy (you private ones too), will be made visible on your blog, if they fit the description in the Meta Box. (In our example: all posts you have tagged with myown.)

Add a BibSonomy Tag Cloud

Adding a BibSonomy Tag Cloud in your blog is very easy. Switch to the Widget page using the Design menu item. Drag the BibSonomy Tag Cloud Widget to the prefered position, fill out the form, and choose a layout style. 

Save the settings and take a look at the front-end of the blog.

Happy tagging,

  Sebastian!

Feature of the Week: Firefox Plug-in

Since we indicated that there would be a bookmarklet buttons version for Firefox it has now come the time to finally introduce it.

Upon installation, three buttons are placed next to your address bar (see screenshot).

Those three buttons represent the actions already familiar to you from the old bookmarklets:

• to open up your myBibSonomy home page you click the first one 
• by clicking the next one you can post a bookmark and resp. 
• by clicking the last one you can post a publication. 

Just like with the Chrome plug-in you can set up shortcuts, thus clicking a button becomes redundant. Just configure your shortcuts in the settings of the add-on. If you are using Firefox occasionally just follow this link to the plug-in at the Mozilla Add-On site and try it for yourself.

Users with browsers other than Chrome and Firefox: We are currently developing similar plug-ins for several other browsers. Next will be a version for Safari.

Happy Tagging (now even faster than ever)
Michael

BibSonomy gone?

No!

The provider that is hosting the DNS entry for bibsonomy.org made an error and added a wrong address to the nameserver. Hence, until tonight, when we detected the error, content from that server was delivered. We now removed the wrong entry and when this change is propagated to your nameserver you should reach BibSonomy again. We are sorry for the inconvenience!


Happy tagging,
Robert