Feature of the Week: Fast tag editing

A very comfortable feature of BibSonomy is available again in Version 3, an easy way to edit tags without having to edit the whole entry. Whenever looking at your own entries in some way you can use the "edit tags button" shown in the picture below to change the tags of this entry. 

The following window will appear. New tags can be added by typing the tag followed by a space bar. Just don't forget to hit the save button! 

You can also edit tags of multiple entries which is desribed in another FotW. 

Happy tagging!
Lena

Feature of the week: System Tags

In BibSonomy there exist a few special tags, so called system tags, which expand its functionality. Today I'd like to give a short overview. Information on (system) tags can also be found on our help pages.

System tags can be grouped into two categories:

Tags that can be added to a post 

• for:<groupname> copies a post to a group's collection with the tag replaced by from:YourUserName. The copied post will remain unaltered if you change or delete your own post. You must be a member of the group you forward the post to.
• myown: adds the post to your CV page.
• send:<username> sends a post to the inbox of another BibSonomy user. To use this tag, the receiver must have added you to his BibSonomy friends list or you and the receiver must have at least one group in common.
• sys:hidden:<tag> hides a tag from every user besides yourself. 
• sys:relevantFor:<groupname> adds a post to the relevantFor-page of the a group. This tag has the same effect as selecting a group in the "relevant for"-box while editing the post.

Tags that can be used as a filter for search queries 

• sys:author:<authorname> filters the search range by author.
• sys:bibtexkey:<bibtexkey> filters the search range by bibtexkey.
• sys:entrytype:<entrytype> filters the search range by entry type.
• sys:group:<group> filters the search range by group.
• sys:not:<tag> excludes entries with tag <tag>. Here you can also use wildcards, e.g. sys:not:news_* excludes all posts with tags that start with "news_". See our earlier blog post for more information.
• sys:title:<title> filters the search range by title.
• sys:user:<user> filters the search range by user.
• sys:year:<year> filters the search by year of the publication. Several arguments are possible, e.g.:
• 2000: all posts of the year 2000
• 2000-: all posts from the year 2000 or from one of the following years
• -2000: all posts from the year 2000 or from an earlier year
• 1990-2000: all posts from the years 1990 to 2000

I hope this overview will help to improve your experience with BibSonomy. 

Happy Tagging!
Lena

Feature of the week: Improved batch-edit site

In the recent Bibsonomy Release (Link) we included a new batch-edit user interface - a means to manipulate several of your publication posts at once. Next to a complete overhaul of the pages layout came the introduction of BibTeX-Key normalization for multiple posts. This blog post shall give you an overview of the new idea behind the page design and functionality and the benefits that come with it.

Access to batch-edit site via the gear menu on the upper right.

As usual you can navigate to the batch-edit site via the little gear on the top right of your post overview.  

Link to click to get to batch-edit site.

You will be presented with a context menu showing the access to the batch-edit site in the lower part of the menu. Click this link (edit own entries) to get to the batch-edit site.

Standard view of the batch-edit site.

You now get an overview of the posts that you were just looking at as you did before. But now you can see that we changed the way to select certain actions quite a bit. All possible actions - available for your post selections - are displayed in the upper selection box. Tag fields are only activated if the corresponding action (update tags) and post are marked (via the front checkbox). Tags can be added to all selected posts below if the update tag action is activated, so there is no real change to the old behaviour. Completely new is the normalization of BibTeX-keys for several posts as one of the supported actions. An activated "update tag" selection can be seen in the picture below.

Update Tag view of the batch-edit site.

As you can see the tag fields are now accessible because the proper selection was made.

To sum things up, the main parts of the new page design are:

• checkboxes on the left to control selection of posts
• selection box to choose an appropriate action (now with BibTeX normalization)
• tag fields on the right to enter new tags or delete old tags

The new site design will help us to add new features to the batch-edit site and keep everything usable because now we do not use checkboxes for every single available operation.

We hope you like the new interface. As usual if you have feedback, please submit it in the comment section below.

Happy mass tagging ;)

Philipp

Feature of the week: clouds

Looking out of the window, I can see the visible mass of condensed droplets or frozen crystals that are so typical for a German sky in autumn. Consistent to the weather, this week's feature is about clouds. In BibSonomy (and other collaborative tagging systems), clouds reflect the common vocabulary of the system's user. It's fun to occasionally viewing BibSonomy's cloud to get an overview of what other people liked. When hitting the cloud link, you may have realized some layout changes. Also, the computation of the tag cloud changed. We now exclude predefined tags such as imported, and only consider those tags that have been used by more than 10 different users. Small changes, which hopefully make a difference.

Beate