Henry Rzepa's Blog

Sometimes, as a break from describing chemistry, I take to describing the (chemical/scientific) creations behind the (WordPress) blog system. It is fascinating how there do seem increasing signs of convergence between the blog post and the journal article. Perhaps prompted by transclusion of tools such as Jmol and LaTex into Wikis and blogs, I list the following interesting developments in both genres.

1. Improved equation display for Chemistry Central articles using MathJax  This is a way of rendering equations in the pages of both a Blog  and a journal article. This blog is now so empowered, although in fact I employ few equations on these pages.
2. Citation management and meta-data gathering. This blog plugin takes the form of a numbered citation[1] as here, and which converts the specified DOI to a listing at the bottom of the post in the manner of a conventional scientific article (conventional document citation managers such as EndNote do this as well). It is actually much more than that, since the plugin automatically uses the CrossRef API to retrieve metadata for the quoted Digital Object Identifier (DOI), thus enhancing the metadata associated with the post and its discoverability. Dublin-Core is already present in the post as well as FOAF output, and I occasionally trawl using the Calais archive tagger (although this is not very good at finding chemistry tags).
3. I installed Chemicalize a year or so ago. This scans the blog text for chemical terms, and adds a hover/popup image of structures it identifies (it is also responsible for the occasional doubled Gravatar image you may see here! Apologies!).
4. I noted the addition of ChemDoodle to this blog previously. There may be newcomers which I need to track down to this type of non-Java based molecular rendering.

So you can see that building a chemical/science-savvy blog can be great fun! It is also significant that science/chemistry publishers are starting to do this. I bring only one example to your attention, although this introduces a host of other issues that perhaps I should leave for another post.

References

1. H.S. Rzepa, "The past, present and future of Scientific discourse", Journal of Cheminformatics, vol. 3, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1758-2946-3-46