Connotea & Postgenomic complaints

I was catching up on my Bloglines subscriptions and came across Tiageo's 'Pissed with Connotea' post about some complaints he had about some NPG products. I was going to reply in a comment but figured that T's points are worth addressing here, too.

1. [Connotea] Performance and downtime: Sometimes to submit a citation takes ages, or the service is down (although, regarding downtime, it seems to be getting better).

Yeah. This is something that has plagued Connotea recently though it is getting better as you say. Unfortunately the solutions aren't as easy as you might think. Ian Mulvany - who runs the site - was saying earlier that they're looking at adding a new server this week, which should help.

2. Postgenomic: When I tried to use it, it was mostly down. Want anedoctical evidence? If you search now (as of the posting date of this entry) for postgenomic on google, the cached page says: “Unable to select database”, nothing more.
3. Postgenomic again: A few months I submitted my blog. I got no answer at all.

These are also fair enough but I should point out that Postgenomic isn't an NPG product - it's run by me. NPG do let me keep developing it during work hours.

What I'm saying is - don't blame NPG, blame me. ;)

Downtime hasn't been a problem for Postgenomic recently, I don't think (I check it every day and it has been fine) but there *was* a long standing issue to do with firewalls and TCP/IP expiry timestamps that I won't bore you with - suffice to say that it meant that pages wouldn't load correctly on some platforms and that it's fixed now.

I know about the Google thing. It's a bit embarrassing but I haven't gotten round to doing anything about it yet..

re: not replying to your email... I'm normally quite good at getting back to people quickly (no, really). I found yours again and my excuse is that I was on a plane to SFO when I read it - must have put it on the 'to do' pile and forgotten about it. Sorry. :(

As a side note you're listed now.

HTH.

Connotea: basic integration with Word

Word 2007 has some built-in support for bibliographies and citations. It's pretty basic and has some, um, issues, but by using it you can get your Connotea bookmarks into Word fairly quickly.

Here's how:

1. Enter your Connotea username in the form at the bottom of this post, press 'get bookmarks' and wait for a couple of minutes while a script fetches your bookmarks via the API (if you have lots of bookmarks then this could take some time)


2. Save the resulting file (as .XML - "sources.xml" would be a good name).


3. Open up Word 2007


4. Click on the References tab. In the "Citations and Bibliography" panel click on "Manage Sources"


5. Click the Browse button and select the XML file you saved in step 2.


6. Any bookmarks in your Connotea library that had citation information attached to them should appear in the 'Sources Available' listbox. Select those appropriate to the document that you're writing and copy them across to 'Current List'.


7. You can now use the 'insert citation' and 'bibliography' buttons to insert citations and generate formatted bibliographies, respectively.
   

Con2Word XMLatron

Connotea username:

Delicious to Connotea, mk2

Ben Lund has written a script to transfer your bookmarks from Connotea to Delicious. Sure, it's in trendy Ruby, only twenty lines long and works great, but really, how rude.

To restore balance to the universe Konstantin Baierer has come up with diu2con.pl which is written in reliable Perl, is only slightly longer and also works great. It transfers your del.icio.us bookmarks to Connotea. It uses your del.icio.us login credentials, which means that it has none of the limitations of del2con.

(update: also check out Alf's Greasemonkey script that transfers del.icio.us bookmarks to Connotea, again using the two APIs. I'm undecided as to how many lines it counts as but... it's short).