Debate watching

Hey everyone,

As election season nears we’ve been asked a few times how students can cite the presidential and vice-presidential debates.  Using the TV citation form, it’s simple. Here’s an example:

2008 Presidential Debate. CNN. New York. 26 Sept. 2008.

Personally, I’ve always found the weeks leading up to an election exciting. The twists and turns this race has taken have been no different. Here are some links I like to check out:

• C-SPAN debate center
• Electoral-vote.com
• Miss a debate? You can find it on Hulu

And of course, for everyone out there that’s of voting age: regardless of your politics, it’s important you participate. Be a good citizen and register to vote - click here to learn more.

Downtime resolved: 8pm-midnight on 10/6/08

Hi all, If you tried using our site last night, you may have experienced intermittent downtime. We had significant concurrent traffic on our system that ended up locking up some of our front-end servers.

We’ve resolved the immediate issue, but are taking steps to prevent this from affecting us long term:

• Two additional front end servers to be deployed this week
• Additional RAM upgrades across front-ends
• Exploration into cloud-computing solutions to handle traffic spillover

Again, apologies for any issues you may have experienced and know that we are working our hardest to keep downtime at a minimum.

Citation tweaks, speed improvements, & more

We deployed some updates to EasyBib today - here’s a brief summary:

Citation source updates: We’ve added the “vinyl recording” type to the musical recording citation form (thanks Emily!), and the Book of Proverbs to the Bible form (why that was missing the first time around we have no idea - thanks Timothy and Daniel for pointing this out).

Interface updates: A lot of people have been asking if they can export their citations to Word. Even though we’ve had that option since we launched, it was slightly buried. We’ve moved the links around a bit so it should be easier to find (thanks Tom, for this and all of your other great suggestions).

Bib4School tutorials: For our new Bib4School subscribers, we’ve added a number of tutorials to the administrator control panel that help walk you through the process for creating teacher and student accounts.

MyBib signup reminders: When you sign up to a MyBib account, we’ll email your login and password information so you don’t forget.

Speed improvements: We’ve optimized our database, and that’s made our pages load a lot faster. We hope you notice the difference.

Google Chrome on EasyBib

Hey bibbers,

Not sure if you’ve heard, but Google released a new web browser today they are calling “Chrome.” We’re big fans of Google at EasyBib - we use the Google Apps suite of tools for all of our internal business needs, we use Google search (obviously), and so on - so Chrome was something we were excited to check out.

Let me first get my personal opinions out - Chrome is a fast install, has a non-intrusive interface, and works speedily. Most of the sites I use load a lot faster in Chrome.  It’s a beta product, so there are some small issues (for instance, javascript rich text editors, like the one in Tumblr, don’t work properly).

On that basis alone, I’d encourage anyone who is interested to at least check it out. I’m a FireFox user, but I’m likely going to switch to this. Internet Explorer users, Chrome is worlds ahead of what you’re used to.

So why am I writing this post? Well, new browsers always have implications for Web developers, especially new browsers launched by a company with Google’s reach.

The biggest concern is interface stability: Web browsers can interpret a site’s code differently, which could have far reaching implications for how a Web site looks. For instance - we spent a lot of time making sure our site looked the same in IE and Firefox, but there are minor issues that are still not perfect. Adding another browser in the mix could complicate matters.

Fortunately, Chrome uses Webkit, which Apple’s Safari is also based on, and our pages render well.  So that’s one concern neutralized.

The thing that I was most interested in, however, was something new Chrome is bringing to the table. This is the Chrome Task Manager, which is basically a way for users to tell with Web sites are hogging all their memory. We’ve all been in situations where our browsers freeze and crash, and we don’t know why. Well, Task Manager is a way of figuring out which Web sites are naughty and which are nice.

So how does EasyBib perform?

Here’s the screenshot - When I first load the EasyBib site, it loads about 11MB of memory, but then goes down to about 7MB. As I use the site, it hovers around 10MB. I’ve included some other sites for comparison.

Overall, I think 7-10MB is pretty decent. Fellow web developers, what do you think? For your own sites, were you happy with your memory performance? Any suggestions to lower the usage number? Post your thoughts in the comments.

New citation format: Blogs & Podcasts

A common question we receive on our help desk is, “How do I cite a blog?”  Blogs are increasingly becoming a mainstream source, and students are often finding the information they need for their papers in this relatively new type of source.

To help, we created the blog format. You can cite a full blog article, a blog comment, and even interviews and product reviews.

Blogs are information sources that you should treat with some care.  There are thousands of blogs that are written by professionals and experts, but there are thousands more that may not be. Obviously blogs are becoming a very important medium for information transfer, so to categorically deny this source as a respectable citation medium would be the wrong thing to do. Just take pains to double check the quality of what you’re citing.

And let’s be honest: this applies to all sources you use. Always confirm the quality of your materials when you do your research.

EasyBib featured on CNET Webware

Easy as ABC: Web Apps for Students

“This one is a little bit of an old school pick, but it’s an indispensable resource for every student.”

Thanks guys!

Our first widget: minibib

Our first foray into widgetry: we bring you minibib.

What’s minibib?

minibib is a quick and easy way to let your users start citing sources directly from your Web site. Selecting a source from the widget brings them back to EasyBib.

What’s the use case? Well, every now and then we get an email from a public library or a school library asking if they can add a link to EasyBib from their resources page. We’re always thrilled when we get these emails because we know librarians are our hardest audience to please, and know that if they’re linking to us it means they appreciate our work (to all the librarians out there- thanks :) ).

So we thought, hey, instead of just a little old link, can we spice it up a bit?

From that little question grew the idea of minibib. Take a look and let us know what you think.

Introducing ISBN AutoCite

Hi everyone,

As the new design settles in with our users, I wanted to make a few blog posts about some of the new features we have on EasyBib.  The first of these will cover ISBN AutoCite.

Some of the most common sources cited on EasyBib are books. On the old version of EasyBib, book information had to be entered in element by element. Now, given that the bibliographical information in books are already organized by ISBN number, it was only a matter of time until we were able to marry a database full of these numbers with our service.  To cite a book via ISBN number, you first need to go to our book form.

Once there, you just type in your 10 or 13 digit ISBN number (often found on the inside cover of the book or on the back, near the bar code).

Then, click Autocite, and your information should soon pop up.

I’ll admit: we do not have every ISBN in here (many out of print sources are not in our database)- but we’re working hard to collect more data and bring this technology beyond books - to periodicals, web sites, and more.

One last note - MyBib Pro users used to have access to a service called “InstaCite”, which allowed them to search books based on titles and authors. While the ISBN Autocite database is much larger than our old InstaCite database, we do not yet have search by title/author - we will though, very very soon.