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.
As follow up on my Including SMILES, CML and InChI in blogs blog last week, I had a go at Greasemonkey. Some time ago already, Flags and Lollipops and Nodalpoint showed with two cool mashups (one Connotea/Postgenomic and one Pubmed/Postgenomic) that userscripts are rather useful in science too. I can very much recommend the PubMed/Postgenomic mashup, as PubMed has several organic chemistry journals indexed too!
I just found out that a review article that I wrote earlier this year got printed: Molecular Chemometrics (DOI:10.1080/10408340600969601), with my personal view on the interplay between chemoinformatics and chemometrics.
