Bonjour,

I wrote about the linked discission feature back in April. Now, this feature gets even better and I want to share this wonderful information with you.

First of all, it is no longer required to copy the prefix of the post hash (e.g., "bibtex/" or "url/"). Just use the hash betweent doubled square brackets and you get your pretty result.

Pretty is a good point!

The second feature, you definitely will like, is the newly introduced references list. Each link you create in your post will be appended to the references list at the bottom of your discussion post. It enable a simple and clean overview on your citations as well as an additional easy to use access possibility. Just click on link symbol at the end of each reference to have a look at it.

I hope you enjoy our new feature.

Happy discussing

Juergen

Feature of the Week: The Page-Options Menu

Quick access to useful functions is an important aspect in user experience. We are doing our best to create better user experience for BibSonomy users. Let me introduce to you the Page-Option wheel - the menu you can easily access from all BibSonomy pages with lists of bookmarks or publications (e.g. on the home page or on your myBibSonomy page). This menu usually lets you to do actions with lists of posts you see on the screen.

Let me introduce the most common available actions:

export: For the quick export of all publications or bookmarks currently displayed. Of course, the common bookmarks export formats are different from the ones we suggest for publications. You can also tune the export options for BibTex:

sort: Both date and name sort orders are available. Sorted are the bookmarks and publications that are currently displayed.

clipboard: Аdd the shown articles to the clipboard or clear all shown articles from your clipboard.

If you click "edit own entries" you will be forwarded to the page where you can delete several or all of the currently displayed posts at once or add one or more tags to all displayed posts and, of course, do all the common actions with the rest of the posts.

The last (but not least) feature is for those of you who like to work with only one type of resources (bookmarks or publications) by displaying either bookmarks or publications over the whole page width. Let me tell you about the usage of the options menu on some special pages:
 
CV page: Go to the "edit profile" page.

Concepts page: Go to the "edit own concepts" page.

Inbox page; Clear the inbox.

Hope you find these small Page-Options menu as useful as we do!

Happy exporting-sorting-working-tagging!
Mark

In the light of events: BibSonomy's new design

Last week, we did the first step towards our new layout for BibSonomy. Coming up with changes in design had become a necessity over the last years: Change was desired by several of our users and we had noticed increasing difficulty for the integration of new features within the old design.

We have therefore started our redesign, focusing on the post lists and some general elements of the navigation. We plan to continue these efforts for the

• blue header-section (elements like the links to the inbox, clipboard and help have already been moved),
  
• the sidebar,
• the main menu (for now we have simply restructured the entries)
  
• and several other pages like the cv page, the posting dialogues or the discussion pages.

As usual, changes in design are of delicate nature. Next to some few general usability criteria, a lot depends on personal taste or on current trends. Two aspects usually come into play and often contradict each other:

• A new design can make a system more open, more easy to use and more understandable for new users.
• A new design always requires adjustments and new orientation from the current users.

For the new design we have received quite some feedback. While much of it was positive, there has also been some criticism. Rest assured that we always take your feedback very seriously; each contribution is carefully debated in our developer meetings.

We are very content about having such an active and dedicated user base and thank everyone who has let us know of their opinion and has provided helpful hints and recommendations.

One of the main aspects for criticism have been the large fixed elements of BibSonomy (like the header and footer section). While such a fixing has certain benefits (e.g., all navigation elements and all information about the visited page is always available) it has caused usability issues on smaller screens as they “eat space”.

Today we reacted by making all elements scrollable again for smaller screens (less than 900 pixel of inner height). Thus - especially on small screens – it will again be possible to use the full height of your screen for the main content. We hope that this will settle most of the screen real estate problems for now. We have made these space issues a priority in our consideration for future improvements. For example, we will squeeze the representation of single posts in one of the following releases (probably by the end of the month). An idea - currently under discussion - is to make the fixing of elements optional with a switch in the user settings.

Another subject of discussion has been the new set of icons. New icons have to be understood and learned. However, icons also have several advantages over textual representations when they are used as metaphors for often-used features:

• Once they are understood, they are more easy to spot and to hit.
• Icons can summarize long text elements using only little space.
• Icons make the site more lively and are usually better received by new users.
• Especially on a page that is long on text anyway, they are well suited to distinguish the content from the functionality.

We are confident that the new icons will be understood quickly and that much of the functionality is now better represented. All icons are labeled (just hover over them) to make the exploration of their function as easy as possible.

Several other issues regarding smaller details have been remarked by some of you. All of them will be considered and each of you who has sent us some hints, wishes or propositions will receive an answer during the next days.

We wish you lots of fun at using the system in its new layout and hope that some of you will even discover some functions they had not been aware of before. As always let us know what you think (blog, twitter, email) - we are always eager to hear your opinion!

Happy tagging

Your BibSonomyCrew

P.S.: As always, Shift-Ctrl-R helps to empty your browser's cache to savor the latest changes.

Feature of the Week: Next Week's release

In the past weeks we were busy implementing BibSonomy's new look we announced in December. In this post we present a preview of the new layout you will experience from the next week on. Let's start with a screenshot of the start page for logged-in users:

As you can see: the general layout is the same: at the top the blue navigation and search bar, to the right the sidebar and to the left the bookmark and publication lists. The most obvious change are probably the new icons on the left of each post:

They show the type of the bookmarked publication, in this case a conference talk ("inproceedings"). In case you have uploaded a document to the post, its preview is shown on some pages (user and group pages). For bookmarks we plan to add screenshots (a student is already working on this). The yellow "sash" highlights your own posts. If you hover with the mouse over a post, it is highlighted by a yellow background and the new action icons appear that allow you to pick the post for the clipboard (formerly "basket"), edit, or delete it.

Actions you can do with all posts on the page are now all accessible at the top gear of each list:

Just hover with the mouse over the gear and you can access the options to export and sort your posts, pick or edit them. Another new menu can be found at the top of the sidebar:

This menu allows you to quickly access some unique features of BibSonomy. The first two icons guide you to your inbox and your clipboard (formerly "basket") and show how many posts they contain. With the next icon you can access your spheres, the edit tags page, your settings, this blog, and the help.

We hope that you will like the new layout and forgive us possible bugs that you will certainly find. Until then we try to decrease your chance of finding a bug by intensively testing the new layout.

Happy bookmarking!

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy's new Look

The days at the end of the year are usually a good time to look back on the past 12 months and to take a look ahead to ideas, tasks and challenges for the approaching new year. This week's post is dedicated to the latter and the bigger goal we have set for BibSonomy in 2012 is to give it a new, revised and modern design.

Since its birth in 2005 BibSonomy has been enriched with new features to facilitate and ease the organization of bookmarks and publications, the social interaction with other scientists or getting up to date with the state of the art in science. For some time now, we've felt, that BibSonomy could use a fresh look and a new, reorganized navigational structure, to keep all this functionality together while still being a lightweight and easy-to-use system.

With all that in mind, earlier this year, we started two initiatives: The first one was to set up a project together with our University's department for Human-Machine Systems Engineering. In that project students from different disciplines were asked to use BibSonomy (as first timers) for several tasks that belong the the system's core (like storing and retrieving publications, searching for them or for other users). The participant's behavior was analyzed (e.g., using professional eye-tracking tools) and their feedback collected.

The second initiative was to find a capable designer who could give BibSonomy a fresh, cool look and feel while making functional and intuitive navigational design a key priority. Finally, since changing established workflows and interfaces is usually a delicate matter, another priority was to keep a new design true to the current look and feel.
We are happy to announce that for that task we could win a young designer from Kassel: Daniil Tanygin.

Before we begin to realize a new design, we now want to ask you - our users - for your opinion. Therefore, here are two of the latest sketches Daniil has created for us that show one of the many post-listing sites (e.g., myBibSonomy or home) in BibSonomy:





Any feedback is welcome. We are especially looking forward to your thoughts on the new design ideas and to your own ideas on workflows that you think should be simplified, parts of the page that in your opinion should look different or functions that need to be made more intuitive.
Feel free to state any comment below this post, or send us your feedback via e-mail to webmaster bibsonomy org

Happy tagging
Stephan