Hi everybody,
we are still working to get BibSonomy up and running again.
We have experienced a long power blackout in the neighborhood yesterday and systems are only slowly coming back on - we're heavily working on that.
More updates as soon as the situation is resolved.
We'll be back!
Stephan
Thứ Bảy, 2 tháng 11, 2013
BibSonomy's Downtime, Finally!
Since this day's noon BibSonomy is running in normal operation again. As we already said, the downtime was caused by a power outage in our neighborhood.
We try our very best to ensure 24/7 operation and we truly are aware of our responsibility. For handling power outages, we already distributed our server load over two independent UPSs (uninterrupted power supplies). A separately installed process monitors all our vital services and sends out pager messages to all responsible BibSonomy team members. The same was true last night - and accordingly our system administrator was on-site short after the power outage occurred. But their was nothing he could do, as the power outage lasted two long for our university's Internet main routers.
Until noon there were still issues connected with wrongly configured routers due to the blackout. But during the last few hours we monitored our systems and are now sure that everything is back to normal. For managing longer power outages in future we installed another UPS. Some permanently installed switches remain to be connected to the new UPS by a technician who already is scheduled.
As a consequence of this downtime which lasted way too long we enforce our activities in distributing BibSonomy's installation across two geographically independent locations. We hope that we didn't cause too many problems and we are really sorry for all inconveniences!
Keep on tagging!
.folke
We try our very best to ensure 24/7 operation and we truly are aware of our responsibility. For handling power outages, we already distributed our server load over two independent UPSs (uninterrupted power supplies). A separately installed process monitors all our vital services and sends out pager messages to all responsible BibSonomy team members. The same was true last night - and accordingly our system administrator was on-site short after the power outage occurred. But their was nothing he could do, as the power outage lasted two long for our university's Internet main routers.
Until noon there were still issues connected with wrongly configured routers due to the blackout. But during the last few hours we monitored our systems and are now sure that everything is back to normal. For managing longer power outages in future we installed another UPS. Some permanently installed switches remain to be connected to the new UPS by a technician who already is scheduled.
As a consequence of this downtime which lasted way too long we enforce our activities in distributing BibSonomy's installation across two geographically independent locations. We hope that we didn't cause too many problems and we are really sorry for all inconveniences!
Keep on tagging!
.folke
Thứ Sáu, 1 tháng 11, 2013
Feature of the week: Localized Date Information
This week I'll describe a rather small, but nevertheless important new feature. Some of you might never have noticed that the date of publications was rendered in many different ways - namely as it was given by the corresponding user who entered the publication meta information into BibSonomy.
With BibSonomy's last release we made some efforts to consolidate the representation of dates in publications. Some heuristics are applied for parsing as many different given date formats as possible. This allows us to render the corresponding date strings according to a consistent date format - especially depending on the logged in user's language settings.
Happy Tagging -- and stay tuned for the upcoming new release 2.0.16!
.folke
With BibSonomy's last release we made some efforts to consolidate the representation of dates in publications. Some heuristics are applied for parsing as many different given date formats as possible. This allows us to render the corresponding date strings according to a consistent date format - especially depending on the logged in user's language settings.
Happy Tagging -- and stay tuned for the upcoming new release 2.0.16!
.folke
Feature of the Week: Posting to BibSonomy by Gesture with Android & Dolphin Browser
Because we're still so proud of our mobile version of BibSonomy, this week's feature of the week is about how to ease the process of creating a bookmark or publication post via your Android mobile device.
Because typing lengthy texts and especially URLs is always a bit tedious on small screens and keyboards, the popular browser Dolphin HD offers the possibility of navigation by gestures. These gestures are simple figures drawn directly on the screen, which can be associated with a variety of actions. And here's a step-by-step manual how this mechanism can be used for creating new boomark of publication posts:
- After opening the Dolphin Browser, tip on the gesture icon in the lower left corner, and then on the little cogwheel in the lower right corner to create a new gesture:
- Choose "New Gesture" and select as action "Load URL" (first row) and paste the postBookmark- or postPublication-URL (see below) into the input field.
- Choose a simple and memorable gesture (I chose e.g. a "B-like" gesture to post bookmarks, and a "P-like" one to post publications).
- When you're navigating on an interesting page, just tip the gesture button in the lower right, do the corresponding gesture and you'll end up directly in the correct dialogue of BibSonomy (after logging in, of course):
Of course this is just one possibility to achieve this goal - if you have further best practices, we'd be happy to share them with you. In any case happy gesturing and tagging,
Dominik
postBookmark URL:
postPublication URL:
Feature of the Week: Next steps in BibSonomy
As all of you have probably noticed we are actively working on BibSonomy, releasing constantly new features and improvements. We are not only in the process of developing and implementing new features but we are also discussing the goals and features which we would like to achieve in the next one or two years, triggered by the current projects "PUMA - Academic Publication Management" and "Informationelle Selbstbestimmung im Web 2.0 - Info 2.0" both funded by the German research foundation DFG. With this post we would like to share our ideas with you and we hope for feedback from you. Some of these ideas are more concrete others are relatively vague. So, feel free to comment on all of them.
One of the next features which will be released soon will allow our users to rate bookmarks and publications within the system. We will make this rating information available for external systems like search engines. Thus such information is available to everyone as early as possible – similar to ratings e.g. in results of an online search for hotels. Following this line we plan to add a discussion functionality in form of tweets or comments in the usual way. It is also planed to extend BibSonomy to a full open reviewing system. The idea is to allow everyone to do all kinds of reviews – ranging from a simple comment for a web site to a full blown scientific review for publications.
Another potential direction we are thinking of is the better integration with eLearning systems. We will start with export functions but the plan is to find some way to allow for users of an eLearning system to add new posts to BibSonomy from within their eLearning platform.
With PUMA we started a first clone of BibSonomy together with our university library. It has a slightly different functionality but the core is the same. To be more flexible we will add open social features which will not only allow for a better integration of BibSonomy data into other systems (such as iGoogle, or many of your social networks) but also for a more flexible adaptation of our system's design. Another major feature will be the availability of synchronization options among systems to allow easy accessibility of your and everyones posts from any system (BibSonomy or one of the PUMA instances). We are working an a lightweight version within PUMA but the big solution is the goal we would like to reach in the future.
One current hype comes from the massive use of smartphones. We are thinking of developing apps for the most popular smartphone systems: Android and iPhone. One of the core challenges is the adaptation of the BibSonomy design for the small devices. However, we would not only work on improvements for small screens but also on the design for our regular web site. We are thinking about the improvement of the design and usability of the system in cooperation with professional design and usability experts.
Besides all these new features we will of course constantly work on the improvement of the system's speed, on the improvement of its current functionality and on fixing bugs.
We hope you will like the new features and we are looking forward to your feedback. Please let us know your wishes and we will try to find a way to incorporate them into the system.
Happy Tagging
Andreas
One of the next features which will be released soon will allow our users to rate bookmarks and publications within the system. We will make this rating information available for external systems like search engines. Thus such information is available to everyone as early as possible – similar to ratings e.g. in results of an online search for hotels. Following this line we plan to add a discussion functionality in form of tweets or comments in the usual way. It is also planed to extend BibSonomy to a full open reviewing system. The idea is to allow everyone to do all kinds of reviews – ranging from a simple comment for a web site to a full blown scientific review for publications.
Another potential direction we are thinking of is the better integration with eLearning systems. We will start with export functions but the plan is to find some way to allow for users of an eLearning system to add new posts to BibSonomy from within their eLearning platform.
With PUMA we started a first clone of BibSonomy together with our university library. It has a slightly different functionality but the core is the same. To be more flexible we will add open social features which will not only allow for a better integration of BibSonomy data into other systems (such as iGoogle, or many of your social networks) but also for a more flexible adaptation of our system's design. Another major feature will be the availability of synchronization options among systems to allow easy accessibility of your and everyones posts from any system (BibSonomy or one of the PUMA instances). We are working an a lightweight version within PUMA but the big solution is the goal we would like to reach in the future.
One current hype comes from the massive use of smartphones. We are thinking of developing apps for the most popular smartphone systems: Android and iPhone. One of the core challenges is the adaptation of the BibSonomy design for the small devices. However, we would not only work on improvements for small screens but also on the design for our regular web site. We are thinking about the improvement of the design and usability of the system in cooperation with professional design and usability experts.
Besides all these new features we will of course constantly work on the improvement of the system's speed, on the improvement of its current functionality and on fixing bugs.
We hope you will like the new features and we are looking forward to your feedback. Please let us know your wishes and we will try to find a way to incorporate them into the system.
Happy Tagging
Andreas
Feature of the week: TagCloud
Today we are going to present you the brand new TagCloud, implemented in the newest BibSonomy release.
While using BibSonomy your TagCloud grows bigger and bigger and easily becomes unattractive.
To avoid this fact and additionally give you a better view about your most used tags, the new TagCloud will now be able to show only the top X tags of you.
Where X can be set in your settings page and has an default value of 50 (Pic. 1).
Pic. 1: Your new TagCloud settings.
So this means instead of a 2-page long TagCloud, you will have a small and clear TagCloud containing your top tags (Pic. 2 & 3).
Of course you can still use the old TagCloud, if you feel fine with your current TagCloud behaviour and dont want to change it. The TagCloud can be set back to the old behaviour in your settings page by setting choice of tags to min Frequency.
Let's see it in action:
While using BibSonomy your TagCloud grows bigger and bigger and easily becomes unattractive.
To avoid this fact and additionally give you a better view about your most used tags, the new TagCloud will now be able to show only the top X tags of you.
Where X can be set in your settings page and has an default value of 50 (Pic. 1).
Pic. 1: Your new TagCloud settings.
So this means instead of a 2-page long TagCloud, you will have a small and clear TagCloud containing your top tags (Pic. 2 & 3).
Of course you can still use the old TagCloud, if you feel fine with your current TagCloud behaviour and dont want to change it. The TagCloud can be set back to the old behaviour in your settings page by setting choice of tags to min Frequency.
Let's see it in action:
Major Release with improved performance and new features
Good news everyone - since this morning, we have successfully deployed a major new BibSonomy release! Usually, we try keep the release cycles small and release each feature separately; but as we optimized a lot of internal code in the last weeks and months, we built the new features on top of the updated infrastructure and released all of them right now.
All optimizations and new features were powered by PUMA, a German DFG-funded project. The internal migrations onto a more stable and cleaner framework should be transparent for you as our users - the only thing which you (hopefully) might experience is that everything runs faster and smoother. Apart from that, we added or updated the following functionalities (we just briefly describe them for now, and will present more details in followup posts in this blog during the next weeks):
All optimizations and new features were powered by PUMA, a German DFG-funded project. The internal migrations onto a more stable and cleaner framework should be transparent for you as our users - the only thing which you (hopefully) might experience is that everything runs faster and smoother. Apart from that, we added or updated the following functionalities (we just briefly describe them for now, and will present more details in followup posts in this blog during the next weeks):
- Inbox:
- Surely you've experienced the same problem as we did - sometimes you find a bookmark or a publication which is interesting for one of your friends. From now on, you can directly "send" these posts to other BibSonomy users - just add the tag 'send:FRIENDNAME' to the post, and it will appear in your friend's inbox!
- CV page:
- Another common requirement is that you want to have an easy-to-maintain CV page, featuring your personal details and publications. Have a look at my CV - BibSonomy supports you from now on in this task!
- Enhanced filtering methods:
- When retrieving posts, you can now add the tag 'sys:entrytype:ENTRYTYPE to filter the publications by their BibTeX entrytype. As an example, the following page shows you all publications of the user 'dbenz' which have the entrytype 'inproceedings': http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/dbenz/sys:entrytype:inproceedings
- Automatic DOI-Linking:
- If a publication reference contains a DOI, a "DOI" link is now shown in publication lists.
- New tag cloud controls:
- Now you can limit the number of tags shown in tag clouds to the top x tags only! This feature is activated for all users to the top 50 tags and can be set back to the old behaviour (showing only tags that have a certain minimal frequency) on the settings page.
- Improved user interfaces / dialogues:
- We migrated several input dialogues onto a new internal framework, which results in an improved usability. Among them are the settings page, the post and edit publicaton page and the batch-editing of tags.
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