Translators for major Blog software

DominiqueP

Would it be possible to create translators for the major blog software (bloglines, worpdress, typepad, moveable type)?
Zotero has a document type blog post, it would be really nice for it to recognise the blog posts automatically. Blog posts are starting to be used (therefore cited) more and more.

noksagt

First: I'm sure you're aware of the unAPI and COinS plugins for WordPress. I've encouraged some of my favorite authors who use WordPress to adopt these plugins. This does take effort for questionable payoff & sometimes can't be done by the author. Even Bruce D'Arcus hasn't yet installed the extensions!

The main problems with automagically scraping everything are the efficiency of detection and the different formatting. The site-specific scrapers are all only applied against specific URL patterns. That way, checking against dozens of possible translators doesn't slow down your normal browsing.

Bloglines is an aggregator on a specific site with one skin. I would think it would be easy to make a translator.

TypePad also is mostly under the typepad.com domain, so a translator might be possible.

WP and MT can be hosted anywhere. I don't know what the solution to these are. Encourage the use of plugins for the short term & encourage the platforms to adopt RDF in the long term?

bdarcus

First: I'm sure you're aware of the unAPI and COinS plugins for WordPress. I've encouraged some of my favorite authors who use WordPress to adopt these plugins. This does take effort for questionable payoff & sometimes can't be done by the author. Even Bruce D'Arcus hasn't yet installed the extensions!

:-)

I don't have control of my installation, always having to harass busy IT people to make any changes of this sort.

I am, BTW, for the first time using a weblog as a source for a manuscript I'm working on. It would indeed be nice for these to be auto-detected (maybe using the HTML headers?).

sean

The diversity of templates or skins for blogging software makes it nearly impossible to write generalized translators. That said, it's relatively easy to make blog readable by Zotero, either by going the unAPI or COinS route. The COinS plugin for WordPress couldn't be simpler to install -- just upload and activate -- so I'm not sure what's keeping more people from using it. Then again, I'm clearly biased, since I wrote it. The other option, unAPI, is certainly more flexible but also requires a bit more work to get it running.

The reason we currently only have a plugin for WordPress is that one afternoon I decided to make this site's blog Zotero-readable. It's not complicated stuff (just a few lines of PHP). If anyone out there wants to do the same thing using one of the other major blogging packages, please feel free to get started and to contact me with any questions you might have.

Mr. Gunn

One thing I just noticed is that if you happen, for some reason, to have both the unAPI and COinS plug-ins activated in Wordpress, Zotero will be able to save your post, but won't find any citations you may have embedded in the page. The single page icon appears in the address bar, not the folder icon. Deactivate unAPI and it will find everything.