Feature of the Week: New Release

Yesterday we had a major release which includes several new
functions. Beside some smaller changes and a change of the post
layout, it includes:

• a new layout of the navigation menu. The search box on the right side
  was merged with the box on the left where you can now ask for: tags,
  users, concepts, authors, and search of any kind of text.
• there are new menus under "myBibSonomy" and "Group". The myBibsonomy
  menu includes several old and new features like myFriends, myRelation,
  mySearch, myPDF, myDuplicates (the last three are new). The group menu
  lists all groups of which your are a member.
• the possibility to include a user profile as FOAF (this feature is
  experimental and we will extend it in the near future). Have a look at
  the setting pages.
• a new ranking of tags based on our FolkRank algorithm. A link to the
  FolkRank ordered result list is included in tag pages.
• We added a new resize feature of boxes to make the edit of information
  more comfortable.
• An EndNote import is now possible.

In the next weeks we will describe these new feature here in the blog in
more detail.

Yesterday's major release was the last release before we will merge the
running system and a totally new system which includes the promised API.
As mentioned in a comment today we hope that we can release the API next
week.

I hope you like the new features and the new layout.

Andreas

New BibSonomy release online

In this blog, we usually announce new features of BibSonomy, as we're working steadily on improving our service. Some improvements are more visible, others not so much - e.g. when we optimize things in the code or server infrastructure. The latter is what we have been concerned with in the last weeks - we've continued to migrate old parts of the code into our new web application framework, fixed bugs, refactored some parts of the code, and so on.

Yesterday (Monday, 23rd of Feb 2009) we've released a major part of these "background improvements" - in the optimal case, you actually shouldn't notice a lot of it (except that our service has become faster and more reliable). But as we as developers usually become a bit "system-blind", we'd be grateful for any kind of feedback in case you encounter anomalies or irregularities during your daily work with bibsonomy.org.

More specifically, the following pages / functionalities were touched during the release:

• Basket (http://www.bibsonomy.org/basket)
• Layout filters (e.g, http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/din1505/)
• BibTex Detail pages (e.g, http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2862a7a0fab09d8ee50adbd9c4bdb064d)
• in-place editing of tags
• deletion of user accounts (via settings page)
• JSON-output (e.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org/json/user/dbenz)
• XML output of REST API

In any case we hope to have made better the service for you - and thanks in advance for any kind of feedback! Best regards,
Dominik

New Release

We've just released a new version of BibSonomy which fixes several bugs and introduces new features.

A short overview on the fixed bugs:

• The restriction to a certain user or certain years on author pages was broken, i.e., /publ/author/Jäschke/sys:year:2008+sys:user:jaeschke delivered no results. This works again, now.
  Please note that to get the page sorted by year you will need to add an additional parameter "sortPage=year" and if you want to have the latest articles on top additionally the parameter "sortPageOrder=desc". This is a new feature which allows to sort the posts on a page on (almost) any BibTeX fields. You can even combine fields using "|" as delimiter, such that posts having the same year are sorted by author name.
• The BibTeX field "abstract" was exported as "bibtexAbstract" in some cases. This caused some tools which use this field to break. Now the abstract is again contained in the field "abstract". Note: in the API XML this field is still named "bibtexAbstract". We will see how we can fix this in the future (though it's not really a bug there).

New features include:

• The bookmark posting dialog is all new. It's bilingual, supports reloading of recommendations, automatically fetches title or description, and has a new interface to select for which groups the post is viewable. The old buttons (should!) still work, though.
• Members of groups can now mark a bookmark post to be "relevant for" the group.
• Besides querying the tags for a page only using /tags/, now you can also get the related tags only using /relatedtags/. This is particular useful for the JSON output (e.g., see /json/relatedtags/user/jaeschke/folksonomy and /json/tags/user/jaeschke/folksonomy).
• The publication details page (e.g., /bibtex/25ccf05a86e7f1a089ae83dd47568e6de/dbenz) is all new!

Some of the changes improve working with BibSonomy a lot and we will continue to transfer pages to the new backend. If you have found bugs or suggestions regarding the new pages, please let us know!
We will introduce the new features in more detail with the upcoming features of the week.

New Features released: Similar users + Personalization

Today we've performed a release of BibSonomy, containing some new interesting features you might find helpful! The first one addresses the common problem of finding other BibSonomy users with similar interests as oneself; they might be a great source for interesting content like recent publications or up-to-date bookmarks. On your personal user page (i.e. in the "MyBibSonomy" area), you'll find in the sidebar a new list with "similar users":
We've computed these using several similarity measures - when you click on "more", you can check which one is best for you. When you click on one of the user names, you'll be directed to a personalized page which looks like this:
The main idea behind this personalization is to help you finding the interesting content of this user for you; we're comuting a personalized ranking which sorts this user's posts according to your interests. The tag cloud shows this user's tags, which are probably interesting for you.

This personalization feature is also available when you browse in the "usual way" on a user page - there we provide a "personalize"-Link at the top:
Besides that, this release contains a number of small fixes & improvements - if you happen to encounter any irregularity, we'd be happy to hear from you so that we can fix the problem. Besides that - feel invited to play around with our new features and get the most out of BibSonomy!

Best,
Dominik

New Release

Those of you which have recently tried to delete a post probably have noticed a small but helpful change: a dialog box is now asking you for confirmation. If you accidentally clicked on the "delete" link, you have now the chance to stop the process. If you don't like this feature: just disable it on the settings page and you get back the old behaviour.

This is just one of the changes the new release contains but obviously the most noticeable one. Furthermore, we updated the code to import bookmarks from Delicious and Firefox, to upload JabRef layouts and to pick/unpick posts for the basket. Several smaller bugfixes also made it into the release.

As always a small sidenote: although we tested the code, it might contain bugs we did not find. So if you think you've found an error, don't hesitate to contact us!

New Release

Yesterday we deployed a new release which mainly contains bugfixes and a big cleanup in the underlying database module. It already contains the backend methods for some new features, e.g., the Inbox. During this week we will also try to switch the full text search to Lucene.

A small new feature which has been added is the layoutinfo JSON which provides metadata about the available JabRef layouts (you can see this currenly on the export page). This will be used by our Typo3 plugin to provide a selection of available layouts.

Today's release 2.0.5

Starting today, we want to establish a monthly release cycle, releasing a new version of BibSonomy on the Wednesday before the last Thursday of the month.

The latest release fixes some bugs, e.g., on the newly introduced inbox, title-/description-autocompletion when posting bookmarks, adding/removing user's from groups, and various scrapers (IOP, APS, etc.).

New features include

• The sidebar on the start page now shows the latest blog posts.
• There is a tag cloud for full-text searches available.
• The author-tag pages now show related tags.

We also updated the source code in our Maven repository to version 2.0.5.

The next release is scheduled for Wednesday, May 26th, 2010.

BibSonomy 2.0.6 up and running

As announced roughly one month ago, we are currently establishing a monthly release cycle. We're sure you couldn't wait - since this week, you can experience our latest release. We are running version 2.0.6 right now, and hope it makes your BibSonomy experience even better!

We've fixed several bugs (some scraper issues, problems when searching autors, and other minor fixes) and cleaned up internally some code; besides that, there are some new features:

• When posting a publication, we now offer an autocompletion in the 'title'-field, which matches against all publications in our database. If you find the right one, you'll get the rest of the metadata (authors, year of publication, ..) such that you don't have to retype that stuff again.
• In order to prevent misuse of our system, we now integrated an activation email in the BibSonomy registration process; you can't have access to our system until you've clicked that link.
• As we're all humans, errors occur naturally during editing a publication (e.g., a forgotten author). We've worked over the way how these errors are presented to you - now the error message automatically disappears as soon as you type something into the correct field

Apart from that, we've updated our Maven repository with the latest version of our open-source libraries. We're always happy to see other people using BibSonomy features!

As usual, if you encounter any strange behaviours or errors, we are grateful for a little email notice, and we'll do our best to fix the issues. In any case have fun with the new release and stay tuned to our next release planned for June 30th!

Best,
Dominik

New Release: BibSonomy 2.0.7

We are still on track with our monthly release cycle. Two days ago we released BibSonomy's version 2.0.7. Since then we accurately looked at our log files to spot potential bugs as soon as possible. This release of BibSonomy mainly consists of internal code cleanup and restructuring as preparatory work for pending new features. Additionally we addressed some minor bug fixes. Nevertheless you will notice some improvements:

• On your user settings page you can configure for most resource lists (e.g., in search results) which resource types (bookmarks and/or publications) should be displayed.
• Also on your user settings page you can hide certain advanced features, which are relevant only to BibSonomy's power users.
• Your exported BibTeX-snippets now contain a field which indicates the date you posted the corresponding entry to BibSonomy.
• Most tag related pages (e.g., user-tag pages) contain on the sidebar's beginning references to corresponding tag or concept pages which now also contain counts for the correspondingly matching posts.

Apart from that, we've updated our Maven repository with the latest version of our open-source libraries. We're always happy to see other people using BibSonomy features! As usual, if you encounter any strange behaviours or errors, we are grateful for a little email notice, and we'll do our best to fix the issues. In any case have fun with the new release and stay tuned to our next release planned for July 28th!

Best,
.folke

We did it again...

We just released BibSonomy's version 2.0.8.

The new release mostly incorporates small bug fixes and some feature enhancements. Some improvements will be visible, such as the possibility to export your bookmarks to BibTeX-Entries on each bookmark list.

We also extended the list of supported BibTeX entry types which now consist of

• article
• book
• booklet
• conference
• electronic
• inbook
• incollection
• inproceedings
• manual
• mastersthesis
• misc
• patent
• periodical
• phdthesis
• preamble
• presentation
• proceedings
• standard
• techreport
• unpublished

We continuously look at our log files for spotting possible bugs - but we need your help for steadily improving BibSonomy. If you happen to encounter a bug or have an idea for a new feature, please don't hesitate inform us (email).

Apart from updating the running system we've updated our Maven repository with the latest version of our open-source libraries.

Stay tuned to our next release planned for the end of September!

Best,
.folke

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: 'Socializer'

Today we released BibSonomy 2.0.9 containing mainly bug fixes and some more visibility for BibSonomy's social features:

• We restructured the navigation links to the inbox, the basket, and the edit tags page. They are now not in one line at the top right corner of the header but in two lines. We are thinking of a larger restructuring of the navigation, but this needs some time.
• We fixed an annoying bug: if you set your profile visible for friends only, you could not see your uploaded photo.
• We added JSON support to our REST-API. This is experimental, not documented, and subject to change. If you want to try it: add an "Accept: application/json" header to your requests (e.g. this query) and you get JSON (in roughly the same format as the XML). Similarly, you can upload JSON using the "Content-Type" header.

The biggest change you will probably notice are the new buttons in the header and in the sidebar. On every user page (i.e., /user/USERNAME) you can now see the user's real name and a link to his or her CV - if both are visible to you. I.e., either the user's profile is public or visible for friends and you are his or her friend. For example, if I visit the page of my colleague Andreas Hotho, I get the following header:

Furthermore, in the sidebar the new socializer allows you to easily add a user as your friend, follow him, or get a personalized view of his posts.

The stars in the friends and follow buttons indicate, if you have added the corresponding user to your friend or follower list. In the example above, the user is my friend but I'm not following him.

As always, parts of the source code are available in our maven repository.

Feel free to test the new features and give us feedback!

Release 2.0.10

Since today, we're running BibSonomy version 2.0.10 on our servers. We also updated our publicly available libraries at our Maven repository. The new release contains various small bugfixes and internal restructurings which should make it run smoother and more efficiently; apart from that, we've included some new features:

• "CV" page for groups: From some of you as our users, we received requests for a "CV-like" page for groups which lists all members and futher information like the group publications, bookmarks and tags. And voilà, here it is - check http://www.bibsonomy.org/cv/group/kde for an example.
• Resizable Sidebar: Sometimes we've heard "BibSonomy's sidebar is too small", sometimes we've heard "BibSonomy's sidebar is too large" - so finally, you can choose yourself and resize the sidebar according to your wishes with the little handle in the top left corner of the sidebar.

The next release (2.0.11) is scheduled for November 24th. If you have any feedback or comments regarding our new release, we'd be happy to hear from you!

Best,
Dominik

What happened with the next release?

... you might ask. Well, we postponed it to mid of January (actually, January 19th 2011). Basically, there are two reasons for that: we have construction works going on at our institute that caused some trouble and we migrated BibSonomy's authentication to Spring Security - an authentication and access-control framework.

This migration to Spring Security will be noticed by you - our users. The most obvious change will be the new "remember me" cookie that allows you to stay logged in for a longer time than the session timeout (which is 30 minutes of inactivity).
When the new version of BibSonomy is released, your old cookie is no longer valid and you need to login again. Hopefully, this causes not too much trouble. In any case - with this post we want to inform you about this change such that you are prepared. Of course, the password reminder functionality will be available such that you can reset your password in case you forgot it.

Some more background information about this change: Currently, you always got such a cookie when logging into BibSonomy. Beginning with the next release, you can choose whether you want to stay logged in after using BibSonomy or not:

Although we always recommend to logout on computers which are not your own, not enabling the "remember me" functionality ensures that a forgotten logout not necessarily allows other users of the computer to access your account. After a timeout of 30 minutes of inactivity your session is closed and you need to login again.

Besides the new cookies, Spring Security brings improved compatibility with OpenID providers, support for other authentication schemes (e.g., for the PUMA project we need LDAP authentication), and in general a cleaner and more widely tested authentication implementation.

There will be some other changes included in the next release that we will present with the accompanying blog post.

Since Christmas is coming, I am happy that I can announce that some features from our wishlist (see my last blog post) are now going to be implemented: an OpenSocial API and a TeXlipse plugin for BibSonomy. Finally, the new document upload is almost finished. It allows you to upload the documents (yes documents - not just one) for your publication while editing the post. I have tried this on our development system today and really liked it. I hope you will enjoy it, too.

Last but not least, we want to thank our users for using BibSonomy and our funders for giving us the opportunity to develop such an amazing system.

The whole BibSonomy team wishes you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Happy tagging!

Release 2.0.11

As announced, we released BibSonomy version 2.0.11 today. We also updated our publicly available libraries at our Maven repository. The new release contains various small bugfixes and internal restructurings which should make it run smoother and more efficiently; apart from that, we've included some new features:

• Spring Security: BibSonomy now implements Springs access-control framework for the user authentication process. For you as BibSonomy user there are several smaller changes that come along with the new framework:
  
  • The remember-me cookie (the cookie that keeps you logged in) is now optional. You can choose to stay logged in with a checkbox on the login-page. Note that using the login on the BibSonomy start page you will not get the cookie.
    
  • The registration process for OpenId is now significantly easier.
  • The registration link in the upper right corner has been removed. To register simply click sign in to get to the login page to find a registration link.
  • The passwort-reminder has changed: After requesting a new password you will receive one that only allows you to change your password. Afterwards you'll have to use the regular sign in.
    
• The BibSonomy URL now accepts a new parameter resourcetype. E. g. http://www.bibsonomy.org/json/?resourcetype=publication will retrieve publication posts. The other option is of cause resourcetype=bookmark.
  
• When posting a publication that you are the author of, you can add the tag myown to it. As from now you can also use the checkbox "I am an author" in the editing dialogue edit publication - which adds the tag myown to the post. Note that this also causes those posts to appear on your CV page.
  
• The publication details page shows a DOI link, if a DOI is available.
  
• Two new scrapers are offered: The PNASScraper for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and the ScienceMagScraper for the Science Magazine.
• The photo you can upload on the settings page is now only scaled to 200 pixels for the longest side, if the longest side is larger than 200 pixels.
  

The next release (2.0.12) is scheduled for February 23h. If you have any feedback or comments regarding our new release, we would be happy to hear from you!


Best,
Stephan

New Release of BibSonomy Typo3 Plugin

In many corporate and academic environments, Typo3 is a widely used Content Management System. Because including publication lists and tag clouds from BibSonomy directly into Typo3-based web pages is a frequent requirement, we are offering a Typo3-Plugin for BibSonomy since quite some time. Basically it makes it easy very easy to display BibSonomy content in various formats. Here are some examples of pages created with this plugin:

• http://cms.uni-kassel.de/unicms/index.php?id=iteg_publikationen0
• http://www.is.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/mitarbeiter/hotho/pubs/
• http://www1.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/staff/wolff_alexander/publications_by_type/

We are now happy to announce a new version of this plugin, namely 2.0.7. It is basically a bugfix release, including some enhanced layout options (e.g. specifying the width of publication/tagcloud columns). We recommend all users of the plugin to update to this version. It can be downloaded from here:

• http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/ext_bibsonomy/current/

An extensive documentation (including two quickstart sections how to include a publication list / a tag cloud in your Typo3-based website) is also provided. Finally, we are - as usual - happy about any feedback how we can optimize the plugin according to your needs!

Best,

Dominik

New version 2.5 of JabRef Plugin available

Since a while, we are offering a BibSonomy Plugin for JabRef, the latter being a popular application to manage BibTeX-files locally. The plugin basically combines the advantages of an online system like BibSonomy with the comfortable editing facilities of a local standalone client.

We are happy to announce version 2.5.1 of this plugin, which contains several bugfixes and interface improvements; in addition, the file handling (i.e. the management of PDFs associated to entries) has been worked over and is much smoother now. Have a look at the new version here:

• http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/index.html

The list of changes is is found here:

• http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/changes-report.html

and the direct download link is

• https://gforge.cs.uni-kassel.de/frs/download.php/74/jabref-bibsonomy-plugin-2.5.1-bin.jar

We'd be happy about and comments or suggestions for improvements!

Best,

Dominik

Release 2.0.12

Today we updated BibSonomy to version 2.0.12. As always, the new libraries are at your disposal at our Maven repository. Next to various small bugfixes and internal restructuring the following features were included / updated:

• File Upload: It is now possible to upload and attach several documents to one BibTeX-Post. Furthermore, the upload is enabled already in the posting dialogue as well as in the editing and detail views.
• API: API-Requests for Tags now allow a new parameter, that specifies the order in that the tags are delivered. Currently, we support alphabetic order and order by frequency.
• Date: We changed the behaviour of the dates of our posts. From now on, the date is set fix once the post is created and does no longer change with each update/editing of that post.
  

The next release (2.0.13) is scheduled for March 30th. If you have any feedback or comments regarding our new release, we would be happy to hear from you!


Best,
Stephan

Release 2.0.13

Today was our monthly release - 2.0.13. Despite unlucky number 13 BibSonomy is still running and includes now (next to some internal restructuring and optimization) the following features:

• Delicious: Our importer for Delicious bookmarks and Tag-Bundles works now for all Delicious users (we added the functionality for those who use their Yahoo! accounts on Delicious).
  
• System tags: Several system tags are now hidden and visible only to the owners of the according posts. They are also removed from the tag clouds .
  
• RSS Feed: Bookmark RSS Feeds now contain a copy link for each bookmark to conveniently copy bookmarks to your own collection.

We hope you'll find the new features useful and look forward to your feedback.
Happy Tagging!
Stephan

Release 2.0.14

Today was the monthly release of BibSonomy. Next to small fixes, this release includes several efficiency improvements e.g.,

• an overhaul of several pages reducing the amount of data and
  
• a compression (gzip) of all content BibSonomy sends to your browser.

With the new release we also introduce two new features that we will discuss in greater detail in the upcoming "Feature of the week" posts.

• BibSonomy goes mobile: We added a new design specifically for browsers on mobile devices (like smart phones or tablets). The new scheme reduces the amount of information on a page, emphasising the core informations of each page and making BibSonomy fun to use even on small displays.
  
• BibSonomy now has experimental support for content negotiation using the HTTP "Accept" header. Depending on the value of the header, the client is redirected to a view with the specific content-type. Supported formats are "application/rdf+xml", "text/csv", "application/json", and "text/x-bibtex".

As always, get back to us with any kind of feedback and enjoy the new features.
Happy tagging!
Stephan