Announcing the arrival of...BibblyWiki!

[Dave Gifford]

BibblyWiki is a free TiddlyWiki adaptation for students, teachers and
book
lovers at http://www.giffmex.org/bibblywiki.html. It is for
bibliographies, book notes and personal library maintenance.

You click 'new book' or 'new article' in the sidebar menu, enter data
in the form fields, add notes if you wish, add link to the book cover
image url, and hit done. BibblyWiki then generates a pre-formatted
bibliography and several indexes (by topic, by call number, by title,
etc) based on your data. You can even tweak the colors.

Think of it like a watered-down TiddlyWiki version of programs like
Scholar's Aid, EndNotes, etc. with a little bit of LibraryThing thrown
in, too.

There are a few features I am still working on, but BibblyWiki is now
very functional. I hope you like it. I just wish I had had something
like this years ago.

Suggestions and corrections welcome.

Dave Gifford
Mexico City

[Lvood]

Hi Dave,

very interesting idea! As I am heavily using BibTeX in combination
with LaTeX any tool that can not import and export BibTeX or at least
another format that JabRef is able to import and export, BibTeX
compatibility is a must-have feature from my point of view.

So my question: I think that this could be really difficult, but at
least a BibTeX and RIS import would be very helpful. Did you consider
that?
Then, BibblyWiki might get a very powerful extension to tools like
JabRef which is very strong at maintaining bibliographical databases
but not that good for taking notes, cross-linking entries, etc.

Martin

On 1 Mrz., 18:25, "Dave Gifford" <g...@giffmex.org> wrote:
> BibblyWiki is a free TiddlyWiki adaptation for students, teachers and
> book

> lovers athttp://www.giffmex.org/bibblywiki.html. It is for

[jandi]

You just beat me to posting that, Martin.

I heavily use BibTeX for maintaining my growing collection of
references for my thesis. Any way to link my extensive and painfully
collected bibliography to a stronger note taking tool for annotating
those references would make my day. :)

Alejandra
(fellow 'chilanga' :) )

[Dave Gifford]

Thanks, Martin and fellow Chilanga Alejandra

I will have to investigate BibTex. I confess I am not up on what's out
there. I bought Scholar's aid last year and find TiddlyWiki a better
tool for organizing such things. And most programs cost an arm and a
leg. I wanted students to have something for free, something I wish I
had had.

Dave
Coyoacan

[Dave Gifford]

Uh...yeah. I think a project of that nature would be way beyond my
training and the time I have available. I'm just a lowly missionary
teaching at a seminary and tinkering with TW on the side. Talking
about figuring out how to import and export data from other formats is
beyond me. I might be able to create a TW with a form that allows for
the entry fields and types, but even so, such a TW file would already
be fairly bloated even before entering the content.

Of course BibblyWiki is free and someone else can certainly take what
I've done and adapt it if they have the knowhow.

Bendiciones,

David Gifford

[jandi]

I see your point that adding all the field types supported in BibTeX
might be a daunting task, and would result in humongous forms,
specially considering all the different types of references you could
add.

But the whole point of having a separate bib file is to have a nice
little reusable database of references. I'd be happier just to be
able to link to the key of a particular reference, and add notes.
Mmmh, will have to think more about how to best make use of it.

Thanks for working on this adaptation. :)

Alejandra
Coyoacán, ja, but currently in Canada

[Lvood]

Hi Dave,

I already thought that this would be a very difficult task and very
probably too difficult to be integrated in a tiddlywiki.

However, as Alejandra says, it might be enough to have a clear
reference to a bibtex entry in the BibblyWiki and not to import all
the bibliographic data (my most important bibtex library is about 2.5
MB big at the moment and it is a plain text file, so we surely would
not want to import all that information in the BibblyWiki..).

Every entry in a bibtex file should have a so called bibtex key
(that's the first character string after the opening parantheses { at
the beginning of each bibtex entry.
So if this bibtex key would be included in the BibblyWiki, it could be
possible to relate notes in the wiki to the bibliographic information
in the BibTeX file.

I'm still not sure how to make use of that effectively, but the
BibblyWiki looks very interesting.

Martin

[Lvood]

Hi Alejandra,

2 brains - same idea. ;-)

I'm also using LaTeX for my thesis and my main BibTeX file contains
more than 1500 entries and has a file size of more than 2.5 MB.
I'm using JabRef for maintaining it and currently, when reading a
paper or book I'm taking notes (or at least try to do so) about the
contents in the "review" field.

The major drawbacks of this are:
- it blows up my bibtex file even more
- I can take only plain text notes, but as my work field is
engineeringk, it often it would be nice to include a mathematical
formula, a graph or a sketch...

So several times I already considered finding another way for taking
notes but did not really start trying it ...

BibblyWiki could be a possibility, however I'm not sure if it could
deal with formulae and graphics (that also might blow up the html file
and even make it unusable...).
For plain text notes however it might be a good choice.
It could be used as a flexible notebook and if the bibtex key of the
referenced source would be included, it could be used while writing
(and citing) even without having the bibliographic data available -
you just type cite{bibtexkeyOfSource} and LaTeX would do the rest...
why not!

The only thing I would like to avoid is copying or re-entering the
bibliographic information which already exists in the bibtex-File.
As BibblyWiki (at least as far as I noticed) does not distinguish
certain data fields for the bibliographic information, one could
easily export the bibtex data to plain text or html and then copy them
in the BibblyWiki entry.

So the only thing to add to the wiki necessarily would be a field for
a "unique citation identifier" (which would be the bibtex key in our
case).

Martin

[Dave Gifford]

Glad to see you guys are brainstorming on how to use this.

To add a field to the NewBookTemplate on which the new book macro is
based, just go into edit mode by doubleclicking the tiddler and add
the following text:

<tr>
<td align="right"><b>Call number:</b></td>
<td colspan="3"><input name=callnumber type=text style="width:300%" /
></td></tr>

But instead of Call number in the second line, add the label you want
associated to the form field. Say, BibTeX key:

And instead of input=callnumber in the third line add the actual name
you want to give your field, say input name=bibtexkey.

Save the tiddler, reload the TW file, and click new book. The new
field should be there.

I will try to get to doing that for you in a minute on the online
version. But it's pretty late here so no guarantees.

Dave Gifford

[Dave Gifford]

Done. Don't know if that's what you were thinking of...

Dave Gifford

[Dave Gifford]

Oh and graphics aren't embedded in TW. TW only allows for image links
to file locations on or offline. Get the filepath or URL and you can
add an image this way:

[img[url or filepath of image file.jpg]]

As for formulas, I'm not sure. Feel free to check in the TiddlyWiki
Google Group.

Dave Gifford

[Dave Gifford]

okay one more thought.

If you don't want the bibliographic info I stuffed in BibblyWiki, you
can just use any TiddlyWiki and add a tag for the BibTeX key number to
the tiddler for that book or resource. Or else have the tiddler title
be the key number. That way you could search for the key number or
whatever content you put in the tiddler.

So you wouldn't need BibblyWiki so much as any old TW. Or if you like
the BibblyWiki format but there are things you don't need, feel free
to gut the templates or the topmenu of items that you aren't going to
use. If later you decide you want them, just go to the online version,
grab the url, then go back to your file and hit import tiddlers in the
sidebar menu and paste my url and import only those tiddlers you want.

Dave Gifford

[Lvood]

Hi Dave,

thanks for adding the field - I'll try it asap. This morning I took
the time to play a little bit with the original TiddlyWiki to see how
to use it (in general).

For Math in a TiddlyWiki I found somebody saying that he did it with
jsmath,
I found this TiddlyWiki here as an example, have to see if it works on
my mac also.
http://math.chapman.edu/~jipsen/tiddly/tiddlymath.html

Martin

[Dave Gifford]

Check out my TW tutorial at http://www.giffmex.org/twfortherestofus.html
for more basics on TW.

Dave Gifford

On Mar 4, 3:51 am, "Lvood" <elwood...@web.de> wrote:
> Hi Dave,
>
> thanks for adding the field - I'll try it asap. This morning I took
> the time to play a little bit with the original TiddlyWiki to see how
> to use it (in general).
>
> For Math in a TiddlyWiki I found somebody saying that he did it with
> jsmath,
> I found this TiddlyWiki here as an example, have to see if it works on

> my mac also.http://math.chapman.edu/~jipsen/tiddly/tiddlymath.html