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: 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: Hidden System Tags

System tags are an easy means to facilitate your work with BibSonomy. Simply tagging a post with such a tag allows for example to forward that post to friends (send:xyz) or to a group (for:xyz), to mark the post as authored by yourself (myown) or to mark it relevant for a group (sys:relevantFor:xyz).
Until recently, heavy use of system tags would have caused such tags to appear in your post lists and in your tag cloud - often larger than other tags due to frequent use. We believe, that tag clouds should represent you and your interests rather than your habits. Therefore, several system tags are now hidden from both, tag cloud and post lists. As an example see the two tag clouds below.

The first one is the old version where no system tags are hidden, while the second one is what the cloud currently looks like. In the new cloud, the system tags

• sent:anton (indicating that posts were sent to user anton) and
• sys:relevantFor:kde (meaning a that posts were marked relevant for the group kde)

are hidden while the system tag myown appears in both clouds. Note, that the latter tag is not hidden since it not only makes posts appear on your CV page, but contains information about you as an author, which can be of relevance to you and other users as well. The other two tags simply provide functionality but are not informative as such. They have therefore been classified as hidden system tags.
In post lists (like on the home page or user post lists) hidden system tags are generally not displayed. However, on your own posts - if tagged with hidden system tags - you will find a small cog wheel symbol like here:

Hover with the mouse over the symbol and the system tags of that post will appear. Hidden system tags are also visible to you during any kind of post editing. Thus the functionality of such tags is ensured and stays transparent.

Happy (system) tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Similiar Tags

Since this week tag pages in BibSonomy like /tag/ontology also show similiar tags. They're located below the related tags we provide on each tag page in the sidebar. You can use similiar tags for navigation when you're looking for posts related to a certain tag which might have been tagged with not the same but other, similiar tags.

More information on similiar tags can be found in the FAQ and in the online help.