Today at the OSMB we had again a good lunch again, and Rachel Sterne joined our table. She works at a New York based start up Ground Report, which is a news website where anyone, including bloggers, can post news stories. Not links to news stories, as on Slashdot, but actual news stories. Stories that can be committed are not restricted to any topic, or country, or whatever.
Today I leave for a two day visit at the Open Source Meets Business conference in Nürnberg, where Christoph will speak about the Chemoinformatics OpenSource Initiative (COSI). If you happen to go to that meeting too, let’s try to meet!
For each CDK News I try to write up what CDK related literature has been published recently, but I failed to do so for the last two issues. In order to not postpone writing it up until close to the deadline, I will write up things here, so that I can copy-paste it later for CDK News.
Mitch blogged about a comment Bethany Halford, Associate Editor of C&EN, left in The Chem Blog. She is writing an opinion piece on chemistry blogs, and is wondering why I blog, whether I use a nickname, and if my employer knows I blog. So, here goes. Why do I blog?
Yesterday I blogged about how to include the new del.icio.us tagometer on a www.blogger.com blog , just like Improbulus did last December as I discovered later. Felix asked me how it could be done on the new www2.blogger.com template system.
Some days ago I read about the del.icio.us tagometer, which is basically sort of save as I had before on this blog. The tagometer, however, shows some interesting properties of the blog items, like the number of people who bookmarked the item, and what tags they used. The tagometer help does not show how it can be integrated with blogspot.com (where this blog is hosted), but with the source from 0xDECAFBAD I got it working.
The best remedy for being depressed is the rush after hacking some nice new feature (unfortunately, it is addictive). After hacking InChI support into Chemical blogspace a couple of days back, adding some more visual feedback on those molecules is not that hard, with PubChem around that is: Beware!
Recently I blogged about a Greasemonkey script to take advantage of semantic markup of chemistry in blogs (and HTML in general), and later made some plans how this can be extended . One of the ideas was to make this userscript available from the server, instead of having people need to install Greasemonkey and the script separately.
Rich recently blogged about the limitations of the two-atom bond representation often used in chemoinformatics, triggered by the four ferrocene entries in PubChem . In reply to himself, Rich described FlexMol , an XML language that can describe bond systems that involve more than two atoms.
Last night I upgraded the software behind Chemical blogspace , to the version online on Google Code, though I needed the help from Eaun to get paper titles correctly picked up for ACS journals.
Here’s a quick update on my blog about SMILES, CAS and InChI in blogs: Greasemonkey last sunday. The original download was messed up :( You can download a new version at userscripts.org. This new version also supports chem:compound, for any chemical.