Feature of the week: CVWiki: Presenting the Homepage Tag!

Dear BibSonomy users,

a few weeks ago, we introduced the CVWiki, which allows you to modify your CV page on BibSonomy. Inside the CVWiki, you can use custom tags like the ones described on our help page. We now introduced a new tag to show your homepage on the CV page. It is pretty easy to use:
If you have defined a homepage on your settings page, you can enter

<homepage />

at the position where you want to insert a link to your defined page. That's it! You're done :)

Happy tagging!

Major Release with improved performance and new features

Good news everyone - since this morning, we have successfully deployed a major new BibSonomy release! Usually, we try keep the release cycles small and release each feature separately; but as we optimized a lot of internal code in the last weeks and months, we built the new features on top of the updated infrastructure and released all of them right now.

All optimizations and new features were powered by PUMA, a German DFG-funded project. The internal migrations onto a more stable and cleaner framework should be transparent for you as our users - the only thing which you (hopefully) might experience is that everything runs faster and smoother. Apart from that, we added or updated the following functionalities (we just briefly describe them for now, and will present more details in followup posts in this blog during the next weeks):

Inbox:

Surely you've experienced the same problem as we did - sometimes you find a bookmark or a publication which is interesting for one of your friends. From now on, you can directly "send" these posts to other BibSonomy users - just add the tag 'send:FRIENDNAME' to the post, and it will appear in your friend's inbox!

CV page:

Another common requirement is that you want to have an easy-to-maintain CV page, featuring your personal details and publications. Have a look at my CV - BibSonomy supports you from now on in this task!

Enhanced filtering methods:

When retrieving posts, you can now add the tag 'sys:entrytype:ENTRYTYPE to filter the publications by their BibTeX entrytype. As an example, the following page shows you all publications of the user 'dbenz' which have the entrytype 'inproceedings': http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/dbenz/sys:entrytype:inproceedings

Automatic DOI-Linking:

If a publication reference contains a DOI, a "DOI" link is now shown in publication lists.

New tag cloud controls:

Now you can limit the number of tags shown in tag clouds to the top x tags only! This feature is activated for all users to the top 50 tags and can be set back to the old behaviour (showing only tags that have a certain minimal frequency) on the settings page.

Improved user interfaces / dialogues:

We migrated several input dialogues onto a new internal framework, which results in an improved usability. Among them are the settings page, the post and edit publicaton page and the batch-editing of tags.

We performed intensive testing of all released features - if you should still encounter some anomalies, we would be highly grateful for any feedback or bug reports - just send us an email to webmaster@bibsonomy.org. In any case, we hope you enjoy the new features as much as we do!

Feature of the Week: A picture for your CV

For the German LWA conference our institute is hosting in October we are using BibSonomy as central tool to manage the accepted papers. We also offer interesting services to the conference participants which are partially based on BibSonomy.

Therefore, we released some intermediate features today in a smaller release (the next regular release is scheduled for September 22th):

• Publications having a crossref field are now linked to the BibTeX key that is referenced. E.g., this post references the post with the key eisterlehner2009ecmlpkdd.
• On BibSonomy's web pages the authors of a post are now separated by "," (instead of "and"). Only the last author is separated by "and".
• All textareas now have a bar at the bottom with that you can resize them.
• You can now enter an "institution" for your profile which also appears on the CV page.
• Two new links in your myBibSonomy menu: myPrivatePosts and myCV.
• And last but not least: you can now upload a photo for your CV.

Longer explanations of those new features will follow in the next weeks, for now I will quickly explain how to upload a photo for your CV.

Just go to the settings page and there to the section a picture for my cv. With the file choose dialog select a photo from your local file system which shall represent you in BibSonomy. Then press the upload button. The photo is then visible on your CV page - for you only, for your friends or for everybody - depending on the setting of profile viewable for on the settings page. Here you can see as an example Andreas' CV:

Feature of the Week: The CV page

For enhancing the social features of Bibsonomy, the system now features a CV page, powered by PUMA, a German DFG-funded project.

While the feature will soon be improved and prominently included in the upcoming social features menu, currently it is available using the myCV link (in the myBibSonomy menu) and can be enabled for each user (URL).

An examplary CV page is shown below:


The page information, i.e., the "profile" can be customized via the settings options of your account. As an example, consider the settings page below:



The "profile viewable for" option controls the accessibility to the profile: "friends" only allows users marked as friends to view the profile, while "public" enables public access to the CV.
As shown above, the CV contains some personal information, scientific interests, hobbies, and bookmarks and publications marked with the "myown" tag.

Planned extensions concern the upload and display of a user image; additionally, we plan to extend the CV page with wiki-features, such that arbitrary information can be added in a flexible way.

Feel free to play around with the feature, and we are happy to get your comments, suggestions, and further ideas for the CV page!