ACS Mobile

Credit: Linda Wang/C&EN

ACS has released an app that streams new ACS graphical abstracts to your iphone. Unfortunately you have to pay $2.99 for the app. A free alternative I wrote can be found at the mobile site for ChemFeeds.

The nice thing about my version is it works for any mobile device that gets internet and not just iphones. It also covers RSC and Elsevier journals in addition to ACS. You can also email article links to yourself for later reading. Admittedly the ACS version looks sleek, but ipod only apps are worthless for us Android users.

Link to C&EN’s ACS Mobile coverage: ACS Publications Go Mobile

Link to ChemFeeds Mobile: http://m.chemfeeds.com/

Note: If you are not a member of the smart phone community yet, you can still get your graphical abstracts fix at the regular ChemFeeds website: http://www.chemfeeds.com/

Mitch

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Major ChemFeeds Upgrade

I added a crowdsourcing component to ChemFeeds that allows users to vote-up chemistry papers they enjoy. For those uninitiated to ChemFeeds, the website displays the latest graphical abstracts from ACS, RSC, and Wiley. As all things involving crowdsourcing and chemists are unpopular, I doubt it’ll be used much. But enjoy anyways.

The upgrade of the website can be viewed here: Hot 100 Abstracts

Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Update 1: Some parts of the website may not work with ie. :/

Mitch

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ACS PUBS Redesign Brings Chaos To the RSS Masses

The new ACS PUBS redesign is a great step forward for ACS. Unfortunately, it is causing havoc across the RSS landscape from looking at the recent blog postings at The Sceptical Chymist and Everyday Scientist. The root of the image problem seems to be the RSS feeds are calling .tif files even though they exist as .gif files in their respective folders (someone probably mistyped a ‘t’ for a ‘g’). Alas don’t fret, ChemFeeds is working just fine.  So if you want your graphical abstracts fix, head on over:

http://www.chemfeeds.com/

Edit 1: Actually the new ACS feeds seems to be causing greater than normal lag at ChemFeeds. Also, for some journals they are actually calling journal images from folders that have no images in them. So, although I’ve fixed them up as much as I can, I can’t create images in folders, but its better than nothing.

Edit 2: I’ve been going crazy looking over and pruning through their feeds that I generated this cool error shown below.

Edit 3: I just realized it says I’m from the University of Washington, I have no clue what is going wrong with their website now. As I’m connecting through Berkeley’s access.

Edit 4: Rachel has an update: About Those Feeds

Mitch

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Introducing ChemFeeds your Graphical Abstracts Portal

Decided to make a new website, ChemFeeds, where you can view pretty graphical chemical abstracts from various sources like JACS, Angewandte, JOCS, OrgLett, and a whole host of others. It even has the Angewandte puns^CBC, vis-à-vis OCB.

Feel free to roam around at the website, link is here:
http://www.chemfeeds.com/

Feedback and suggestions on how to make the website better and more useful for you, would be great.

Update 1: Permanent link can now be found in the top right header of this website. Which is an extension of the concept and scripts introduced here: Full Frontal JACS

Mitch

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Full Frontal JACS

The Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) has flirted with web 2.0 with it’s recent JACS β initiative. It has been warmly received around the blogosphere [CSB, TCB, CBC]. Although, I don’t have any complaints about the website, what I really wanted was less hand-holding and more of a shotgun approach to navigating through JACS online.

The nicest thing about thumbing through the print edition of JACS, is reading all the various chemistry that is outside your research tunnel-vision but still interesting.  If you go to the JACS homepage, here, you’ll see a list of 20 of the most recent articles, but not all of them! For example, 31 papers were added to ASAP today and only the last 20 are shown on their website, hardly a dire circumstance, but the fact is you miss some by using that setup. JACS also offers a nifty RSS feed of their articles, but I’ve never come across an RSS reader that’ll nicely format an active feed, 30+ submissions a day, in a format that will ever make me want to read it.

So how does one go about designing a more attractive JACS online browsing environment? Below is my attempt, it is as busy and attractive as a conference poster, but it lets you see a huge list of the most recently added papers to JACS ASAP.

The website parses through the JACS RSS feed. I was a bit worried about incorporating the graphical abstracts, but since they are included in the RSS feed, I’m going to claim fair use. The site isn’t pretty, but it gets the job done.

Here is a link for your viewing pleasure, Full Frontal JACS: http://www.chemfeeds.com/

Comments are always welcomed, but obviously this format is not for everyone.

Edit: A link to the site has been included in the links section to the right, towards the bottom under websites, titled Full Frontal JACS.

Update 1: Improved ACIE RSS feed

Update 2: Links edited to point to ChemFeeds instead of the simple script.

Mitch

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