To continue with the SOAP::Lite issues mentioned in the last posting: the problem is solved. My recommendation: NEVER EVER use ‘encoding “utf8″‘ when you want to deal with utf8. Instead, use ‘Encode’ and convert all the strings manually. Tsssss, perl and unicode don’t go well together. Anyway, the batch upload is now working, we’ll clean up the stuff and then provide it to everyone who is interested!

After the maybe useless but funny spherical tag cloud introduced last week, we are proud to have yet another fancy and interactive eyecatcher in ALOE: The “Resource Flow View”.

This view was realized with a slightly adapted version of ImageFlow 1.0.2 by Finn Rudolph. It won’t load images dynamically during navigating, so it loads all thumbnails in advance - this might take a while. We’re still experimenting a little bit with this stuff, so it’s not offered as a menu item in ALOE. To see it, you have to add the parameter “viewMode=flow” on any page where resources of a certain user are shown (this also includes “MyResources”).

Last but not least, we found some bugs in our Live System that we should fix pretty fast. E.g., changing the sort order for results can result in strange behaviour, because certain parameters just disappear… Depending on how long this will take, the release of the new OPENEER might be a bit later than expected.

Procrastination is of course bad when trying to finish a PhD, but it’s good when it’s about new features for ALOE So we now have a nice, fancy and interactive “spherical tag cloud” to display popular tags in ALOE. I’m not sure whether it’s really useful, but who cares, it’s fun and it’s definitely an eye-cather! The spherical tag cloud was realized with a repurposed version of the great WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin by Roy Tanck - check out his blog for more information on how to repurpose his code.

Furthermore, we’ve put a lot of effort in the creation of an install script that allows to deploy instances of ALOE in a more convenient way. Setting up the different components and setting the parameters manually was always quite a lot of work. It runs smooth now, so the updated OPENEER instance should be available this week!

What we also did was to create a small tool that allows for the batch contribution of resources defined via bibtex (or, to be more precise: via BibTeXML that was created with the JabRef reference manager). It’s done with our perl SOAP client, and once we found out why SOAP::Lite doesn’t want work with parameters defined in UTF-8 (everything works fine until you dare to use something like an “ä” or “ü”), we’ll be really happy. Hints are VERY MUCH welcome!