Scintilla

We're doing some pre-launch tweaking of Scintilla, a new science aggregation product, at Nature. It's a something that Alf and I have been working on recently (well, Alf has been working on it, I mostly just complain and then swoop in to take credit by sending out invites at the last minute ;)).

You're welcome to check it out and send any comments, suggestions or bug reports to scintilla@nature.com. We'll be acting on your feedback, so do drop us a line.

There'll be more official announcement on Nascent later.

Dapper

So Andrew has been talking about Dapper and Pedro about kapow, both screen scraping (sort of) services that let you extract data from websites. It's interesting and potentially useful stuff.

Here's my Dapped contribution: an RSS feed of advance access articles from Bioinformatics and NAR. I tried putting Nature advance publications in there but shamefully the nature.com markup isn't up to scratch or something and Dapper refuses to pull out the correct pieces of data consistently. Neh.

There's a little bit of custom PHP code involved to create links for each paper from the doi, to extract publication dates and to merge the two dap RSS feeds - this seems like the kind of thing Pipes was designed for but unfortunately it's not quite flexible enough yet.

I made the original bioinformatics and NAR daps public if you want to tweak them.