I'm finally ready with the latest release of biobar. See Post 1547 or Post 1537. Biobar is a toolbar project for firefox/mozilla/netscape, which allows a user to easily search and retrieve data for a particular search term straight from many biological data collections. The latest release provides access to 38 biological databases . Based on user input from Nodalpoint and other users this release has the following salient features:
- Search Groups of Data (sequences, function, taxonomy)
- Add/Save/Edit Custom Links on toolbar menu
- Open searches in new tab/existing tab
- BioCyc species read in from remote XML file for dynamic updates
- Biobar code rewritten from scratch to move to a manageable XML based format
- Add/Replace own search databases by simple edits of XML files. See Customize.
As usual, I would appreciate any feedback on your experience. If you find the toolbar interesting please put the following logo on your website to spread the word :
Please install biobar on Firefox 1.0 or above/Mozilla 1.5 or above or Netscape 7.0+ only. Lower versions of these browser have been known to create strange problems. Install biobar.
Comments
Really useful project
Installed - working - I like it. It's great to see a project that fulfills a need and is useful, as opposed to the "I did it because I could" category into which all too many projects fall. I look forward to its continued development and enhancement.
Automatic update of extension
You may be interested in adding automatic update.
Here some links:
http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/09/enabling-extension-updates/
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/extensions/update.html
Thanks for this useful tool!
I've installed the new releas
I've installed the new release, everything looks great. I really like the new customizable search menus, however I haven't been able to get them working properly yet. I tried downloading the BiobarSearch.xml andBiobarGroup.xml files, adding a new <Group> to the BiobarSearch.xml file (according to the Editing BiobarSearch.xml instructions), but no luck. After restarting the Browser most of the search menus were not working. This maybe my fault as I haven't really investigated the problem in detail. I'll keep playing around with it and see if I can figure out what I'm doing wrong...
Nonetheless, I think Biobar is a great project. I hope to add all our local lab databases to biobar and distribute the xml files to lab members. Thereby converting the entire lab to Firefox (everyone here still uses IE) and biobar!
non working XMLs
hi greg,
Could you mail me a copy of your edited XML file so I could have a look to see if there was something wrong in the code ? You may need to be escape all the &'s in the URL.. I use the escaped amp; instead. You can mail me at jswamin at gmail dot com
Thanks.
Jawahar
You were correct, it was unes
You were correct, it was unescaped URLs that was causing the problem. Works fine now, I've added all our lab databases to biobar. Now I just have to convince everyone to use Firefox. Excellent !