Feature of the week: BibSonomy mobile

If the BibSonomy development team can be seen as a reasonably representative sample of the technologically interested population, then smartphones are truly finding more and more their way into nowaday's everyday life (despite we still do have some "I-need-my-phone-only-to-make-phonecalls" bastions, but we're working on it :) ). If you share our enthusiasm about the possibilities offered by e.g. the iPhone or Android-powered devices, then we've got something for you: Since our last release, we're featuring a mobile-optimized version of BibSonomy. Check it out:

You don't need any special app - just point the browser of your mobile phone to the "usual" BibSonomy URLs (e.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org), and we'll detect automatically where you're coming from (technical sidenote: we use WURFL for that) and provide you with a BibSonomy website optimized for smartphones. It was built focussed on the following design principles:

• Minimal amount of data transfer in order to speed up loading times and save bandwidth
• Reduction of interface elements to ensure usability on small (touch-)screens
• Similar navigation paradigm to mobile versions of other major websites
• Restriction to required information when posting new entries (e.g. via ISBN) - completion of the entries then be done e.g. later on a desktop machine

Here's an explanation of the basic interface elements:

When navigating through these pages, it may happen from time to time that you end up seing a "normal" page - this can happen because so far, we've only migrated our most popular pages to the mobile version. We're still working on that, and are happy to receive feedback and suggestions which pages should be available next!

In any case enjoy BibSonomy from anywhere using our new mobile pages!

Dominik

PS: Thanks Folke for a great fotoshooting session ;-)

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

Bugfix version of BibSonomy JabRef Plugin (2.5.2) available

As we've mentioned from time to time within our blog, we are maintaining a BibSonomy plugin for JabRef which basically makes it easy to keep your local .bib file (managed by JabRef) in sync with your online BibSonomy collection. We've just released a bugfix version of it - you can find it for download here:

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

And here you can find more detailed information about the plugin:

• Installation instructions: http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/installation.html
• Version history: http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/changes-report.html
• General plugin help pages: http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/index.html

If you have any feedback, we'd be happy to hear from you!

Best regards & happy BibTeXing,

Dominik

Feature of the Week: Improved Content-Negotiation Capabilities

Today I describe a rather technical feature of BibSonomy that is important for programmers and in particular for Semantic Web enthusiasts.
As I already mentioned in my post from EKAW 2010, we are constantly trying to improve BibSonomy's integration into the Linked Data Cloud. In the 2.0.14 release of BibSonomy a new content negotiation mechanism was implemented that augments our first implementation from 2007.

Instead of using the special /uri/ prefix, we now perform content negotiation on all URLs BibSonomy serves. Depending on the HTTP Accept header of your client, you are redirected (with the HTTP status code 303 See Other) to a view representing the requested resource(s) in a corresponding format. The following media types are currently supported:

application/rdf+xml

RDF output according to the BuRST specification. This is basically a combination of the RSS and SWRC schema to describe publication references. Hence, currently only the publication posts are returned.

application/json

All posts (bookmarks and publications) in JSON format. This is a lightweight JavaScript data structure.

text/csv

All posts (bookmarks and publications) as comma separated values (CSV).

text/x-bibtex

Publications in BibTeX format.

In particular the application/rdf+xml media type is important for BibSonomy's integration in the Linked Data Cloud. There are still some issues we have to fix, e.g., proper representation of author order or the vocabulary to represent tagging information (e.g., using commontag.org in favour of/addition to the RSS taxonomy module). Therefore, many thanks to Sebastian Tramp and Pascal Hitzler for there helpful comments.


Finally: Please note that content negotiation works for all URLs, even when it currently does not really make sense. E.g., when you request the /login page in application/rdf+xml, you get a redirect to /burst/login. Since this page does not exist, you get a 404 Not Found error.

BibSonomy's Downtime, 15.6.2011

Dear Tagging-Friends,

despite our efforts to ensure BibSonomy's reliable 24h service quality we are faced with an unscheduled downtime of our university's internet uplink. We hope that our technicians will fix the problem within the next hours.

We will write more on this issue tomorrow...

Stay tuned!


.folke

Release 2.0.15

Today we updated the running version of BibSonomy to 2.0.15. We also updated our publicly available libraries at our Maven repository. The new release mainly contains various small bug fixes and a great deal of internal clean-up. As we are continuing our efforts to increase speed we restructured and compressed all JavaScript content of the website.
The main visible improvements are:

• An overhaul of the handling and display of dates, for example the way a publications date is displayed in post lists.
• New options for the URL-paramter sortPage. By adding "?sortPage=note" to a BibSonomy URL you can order the displayed posts by their note. Other new options for sortPage are "day" and "month".
  

In this release we also included a lot of preparations for new features that are currently being developed and will be included in one of the next releases. Stay tuned!
The next release (2.0.16) is scheduled for June 29th. If you have any feedback or comments regarding our new release, we'd be happy to hear from you!

Happy tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Sort your Post Lists

The creation and export of publication lists has always been a core feature of BibSonomy. Using tags is an easy means to select publications for a list. Yet depending on the application, not only the selection of publications but also their order might be of importance. The latter can be controlled using the two URL parameters sortPage and sortPageOrder.
Here is an example: The URL
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social
returns a list of all posts of the user sdo with the tag social. Using the additional parameters sortPage=author and sortPageOrder=asc in the URL
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social?sortPage=author&sortPageOrder=asc
will yield that same list, ordered by the family names of the first authors in ascending order.

The parameter sortPageOrder has exactly two options: asc for ascending order and desc for the converse.
With the last release we added new options to the parameter sortPage. Thus one can now choose from: year, month, day, author, editor, entrytype, title, booktitle, journal, school and date.
All but the last one refer to fields of the according BibTeX entries of the posts. The option date however yields a list ordered by posting date -- the date of the post's (not the publication's) creation. The date option is the only one, that also concerns bookmark posts.

It is easily possible to combine different options using "|". For example will
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social?sortPage=year|month|day&sortPageOrder=desc
return a list where publication posts are ordered by their publication date (given in the BibTeX fields year, month and day).

Happy tagging!
Stephan