Nascent

Euan, this is a interesting post; we indeed need these tools to get scientific blogging further from the ground, and available to Joe Average (Bio)Chemist too. From the title, I was actually hoping on tools to add chemical content :)

However, the suggestion about entering a DOI resulting in the full citation is a great thought. I can see similar things for chemistry: enter an InChI/CID and get a image from PubChem. (And, of course, everything properly marked up using microformats and RDFa)

I haven't looked at EasyPG... does it work for blogger.com too?

There's Structured Blogging, which is still a good idea but didn't really take off - perhaps because of the way the data was stored: http://structuredblogging.org/

"A plugin that took the work out of finding the free version of a paper (where available) - you just enter a DOI and the software automatically replaces it with the most appropriate final destination." would be the COinS plugin for Wordpress, I guess: http://dev.zotero.org/wordpress

With Zotero you can already drag and drop formated refferences into any text field, blogs included. So you can drag your citations right into your blog post. That said Zotero has some basics on creating utilities that anyone can check out here.

If anyone is interested in taking a crack at some of these they should join the Zotero-dev google group.

Another possibility would be to side-step the blogging platforms and build some additions into a blogging tool (browser add-on or desktop tool). Not that I know of any good ones :). Once I manage to reduce my to-do list I would be glad to (try to) help.

Thanks for the mention, Euan!

EasyPg doesn't work with blogger.com, only with Wordpress. For other platforms, especially blogger and others that don't allow plugins, I'm working on a tool that will do the same thing. I'll post the details when it's ready on my blog.

For the DOI destination finder: excellent idea! It should be simple to implement. I'll have a go when I have a chance.

Thanks again :)

Pierre

This is an interesting problem. A step towards a solution is to embed metadata in the document, using RDFa. The kind of thing we've been working on is placing references to books in a page, but using the ISBN number rather than the usual 'link to Amazon'. Then, when the page is loaded, an RDFa parser can make the ISBN number available, and some action can be performed on it. Of course this could be to link to Amazon--we have an example that uses Yahoo! Pipes to get information--but it could also be to link to someone's wish-list, to Barnes and Noble, or whatever. The point is that what is done with the information depends on the person viewing the page rather than the page author.

I'd be interested to see more about what you want to do with the data, since I believe the key would be to to ensure that the RDFa parser has sufficient ways to hook in custom 'actions' to be carried out on various bits of metadata.

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standards. innovation.

Excellent ideas and feedback. The idea of a science-friendly blogging tool is very important. We need to be able to manage richer content - code, markup, even chemicals and maths. I think a lot of us in the Open chemistry community would be interested in trying to create a plugin

The 'killer feature' that finally convinced me to install WordPress was Steve Mayer's LatexRender. This beauty allows easy jotting down of LaTeX typeset math in a blog. You can read more about LatexRender here. It certainly deserves a mention here.

I'm using my blog as a supplement to a lab notebook, and being able to write LaTeX means I have a place to record my mathematical musings in a form not too distant from what I'd use in a presentation or publication. (As opposed to the chicken-scratch style I've previously employed with lesser success.)

I hope my ConnoShow plugin is useful to others, too. Thanks for the link.

Great topic.

Seemingly trivial, the ability to effectively display tables (esp cut and pate from other applications) in a blog post would be welcome! It is hard to put some types of data up front and center (for example, brief mention in http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=345)

Also, count me in as someone daunted by choosing the "best" tags. Suggestions in the blogging editor (based on word frequency combined with popular tags in bookmarking sites???) would be welcome. Maybe such a plugin is already out there?

Thanks for a place to catalog the wish lists!
Heather

Heather: the easiest way I can think of to get tabular data into a blog post is to

1) Make the table in Excel.
2) Copy the table from Excel and paste it into Word.
3) Save the Word document as HTML.
4) Copy the table HTML out of the saved file and paste it into Wordpress using TimyMCE's 'Paste From Word' button, which cleans up the HTML.

The most useful feature in any bloggin software that I have come across so far is Wordpress' LaTeX rendered. It made me switch from blogger and to WP in a blink of an eye.