4 Sep 2006 (updated 4 Sep 2006 at 23:15 UTC)
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(hello? don't know if anybody reads this, I'm the first to admit I don't write especially interesting stuff, but c'mon I don't think my entries deserve a score as low as our friendly chinese spammers, do I? so if anybody with a heart would be so nice and give me at least a score of 2??)
Pyblio has gained a nice feature. For the record, it's a python framework for handling publication references, but probably also your collection of books, dvds, tapes, whatever.
In pyblio 1.3, you can now adapt a publication database format (from, say, PubMed) into another format (say, BibTeX). It's still more of a proof of concept, waiting for more extensive use. So far I have the following features:
- external queries (pubmed, web of science, crossref)
- adaptation between database formats
- citation formatting (to generate an actual citation from a publication reference)
- searching / editing / storing of references
What I need to complete is:
- storage of fulltext documents (I've a few ideas already)
- interaction with word processors (esp. openoffice)
- glueing all these features in the GUI, which is very rudimentary so far on the 1.3 branch.
I would like to extend the data model a bit, but this will certainly wait until the rest consolidates.
Unfortunately, the community that lives around pyblio has a low ratio of developers / users. Worse, as I had not enough free time these last months for the project, I probably discouraged some potential developers. I really need to lower the barrier of entry into the project, but I don't know how so far. Perhaps by completing a few sample applications instead of adding new features? Writing documentation? Putting some simple web apps online, so that people can actually test some features?