Feature of the Week: Optimize your Firefox Browser for BibSonomy

How often do you use the search box of BibSonomy?

You can speed up searching in BibSonomy considerably by creating some
smart keywords in your Firefox webbrowser.
Afterwards, you can access all your posts with a certain tag with just some keystrokes. This blog post explains how to do this.

First try: Speed up fulltext search

1. Navigate to www.bibsonomy.org.
2. Right-click on the BibSonomy search box that says fulltext search here. Select Add a Keyword for this Search...
   
3. In the dialog that appears, enter a short keyword, e.g., bs (like BibSonomy search).
   
   
4. Fill the remaining fields and click Save.

Now you can search in BibSonomy by entering into your browser's location bar (reach it quickly with CTRL + L) the string bs SEARCHTERM, e.g., bs firefox and pressing ENTER. Firefox will then search for the term SEARCHTERM in BibSonomy, e.g., bs firefox opens www.bibsonomy.org/search/firefox.

Next steps: Add more keywords

Adding smart keywords for other search options in BibSonomy is now easy: just select the corresponding option in the dropdown box

and repeat the steps above with a new keyword. Here are some suggestions:

bt

search for a tag (e.g., /tag/firefox)

ba

search for an author (e.g., /author/Stumme)

bm

search for one of your tags (e.g. /user/jaeschke/myown). This is explained in the next step.

Finally: Quickly access your own posts

Adding a smart keyword to access your posts having a certain tag is now straightforward: go to your BibSonomy page and right-click into the enter tag(s) here field at the top. Again, select Add a Keyword for this Search...

and enter an appropriate keyword (e.g., bm for my tags).

Here I describe a more advanced method that searches for concepts instead of tags. Note that this works even if you don't have relations defined, yet!

1. Go to www.bibsonomy.org/concept/user/jaeschke/arbitrary_tag and exchange the user name in the URL by your user name, e.g., replace "jaeschke" by your user name. Press ENTER.
2. Right-Click in the input box containing the string arbitrary_tag and select Add a Keyword for this Search...:
   
   
   
   
3. Again, enter a smart keyword (I would suggest to use bm as described above.).
4. Search for your posts by entering bm TAGNAME into the location bar of your browser (remember CTRL-C).

Nothing new so far, except for the somehow difficult to access concept search field. But what are the benefits of /concept/user/jaeschke/programming compared to /user/jaeschke/programming? Well, I have created some relations using the tag editor of BibSonomy. One of them says that the tags ada, c, fortran, java, lisp, perl, python, and ruby are sub-tags of the tag (or better concept) programming:

Now, whenever I search for /concept/user/jaeschke/programming, I get all posts having the tag programming or one of its sub-tags, i.e., ada, c, fortran, java, lisp, perl, python, or ruby.

This way I can structure my tag space - and more important - use a logical OR in my queries.

More information about concepts and relations can be found here:

• BibSonomy Help: URL Scheme Semantics
• BibSonomy Help: Relations
• BibSonomy Blog: Relations
• BibSonomy Blog: Relations (revisited)
• BibSonomy Blog: Retrieve resources by disjunction of tags

Feature of the week: New Firefox-plugin released!

Feature of the week: New Firefox-plugin released!

For some weeks now the first version of our BibSonomy-Firefox-Addon is available for Download.
This new feature integrates your BibSonomy bookmarks into your Firefox browser, thus offering comfortable use and storage of your bookmarks without visiting your BibSonomy account. You might also want to synchronize your list of local bookmarks with the ones in BibSonomy.
All you need to get started is the new plugin, your user name and your API-key as password.

• The blue star button indicates whether or not a page is already bookmarked. Clicking it opens the dialogue for storing or changing the bookmark of the current web page.
  

• To the left in your navigation bar you'll find the quick link to your BibSonomy page and the hide/show button for the sidebar.
  The sidebar displays the cloud or list of your bookmark's tags and your tag relations. Much like in BibSonomy bookmarks are retrieved by clicking on one of its tags or using the full-text search.
  

• Our Addon is fully customizable and also allows to remove the standard yellow Firefox-Star-button from the browser. Moreover the settings feature the option to import your Firefox bookmarks into BibSonomy and vice versa.
  

Feature of the week: GoogleSonomy - A Firefox addon to enhance your BibSonomy Search

GoogleSonomy is the name of our new Firefox extension. As you can see in the screenshot below it shows you BibSonomy search results along your Google search. You can retrieve four different lists of BibSonomy posts for a google query. Those are tag and fulltext search, each on a global or a user base.



In the settings dialog you can specify which lists you want to retrieve and how many entries should be displayed each time. Furthermore you can set your BibSonomy user name and choose a default search mode.



To obtain this extension visit Mozillas Addon Page. Unfortunately you need to be a registered user to install GoogleSonomy because it is like any other new firefox extension in an experimental state. Only with some reviews from users we can achieve our aim to get this extension in the public download area of Mozillas download page. So we would appreciate your effort.

If you want to save pains just use this link to install GoogleSonomy in your Firefox web browser.

If you have suggestions how to improve GoogleSonomy or if you found any bugs, please let us know.

Best,
Stefan