darcusblog

Mendeley is a new bibliographic service and application based on a similar ideas as Zotero, Connotea, etc While it’s not immediately apparent, like Zotero, they use CSL.

Zotero has recently moved its 1.5 release into beta status. Key new features:

• XHTML “rich text” notes
• server-based syncing of libraries (no more rsync to keep my home and office machine in sync)

Aside: I’m a little worried about centralized services, particularly after the Magnolia debacle. Would prefer something more distributed a la laconi.ca.

The Zotero team has also updated its website to reflect the beginnings of the social-networking functionality they will be building out in the future. To wit:

• my profile
• my library

For anyone interested in understanding how citation and bibliographic formatting code might work conceptually, the documentation for Andrea Rossatto’s Haskell implementation of CSL is a great place to start.

I find Haskell a bit tough going at the level of details, but the type definitions are really clear. For example, the Text.CSL.Proc documentation includes a citeproc type, whose signature is: citeproc :: Style -> [Reference] -> [[(String, String)]] -> BiblioData The documentation then usefully tells us this means:

With a Style, a list of References and the list of citation groups (the list of citations with their locator), produce the FormattedOutput for each citation group and the bibliography.

I’ve been using Eric Meyer’s S5 HTML slideshow package for the past couple of years, mostly for teaching. But I’ve always wondered when someone would port it to JQuery, and clean up the code base so that I could actually understand it. Gerald Bauer has fulfilled my wish, adding along the way nice touches like SVG integration (see my little demo*); his code is now up on GitHub.