Recently, FishEye shows the total number of line-count of gnizr open source has passed 100,000. Since we have open-sourced gnizr, the traffic to our Google Code project and blog sites continue to increase in a healthy pace. We are very happy about this.
While we can use automated tools to track visitor traffics, but we didn't have a good way to receive and monitor feedbacks from our users. Today a new Wiki page has been created on the Google Code project site to report and receive community feedbacks. This new page called "Success Stories" will publish short descriptions of how users from diverse industries and organizations are using gnizr to facilitate information sharing and improve people's productivity. On the same page, you can find the email address to which you can send your suggestions and feedbacks.
I wrote the first story about my experience in using gnizr to teach the Social Web Technologies course at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 3 Release
Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 3 is now available for download.
- Download: gnizr-2.4.0-M3.zip
- How to install or upgrade
- Configure gnizr-config.xml for 2.4.0
- What has changed
See also: Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 1 and Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 2
I Forgot My Password
People often forget their login passwords. We have implemented a function that allows gnizr users to reset their login password. In the login page, users can follow a "I forgot my password" link to reset their password.
Users must have valid email addresses defined in their respective profiles in order to use this function. Users can change their email address by going to the "settings" page. Administrators (i.e., gnizr) can also change user email address under the User Management function.
When a password reset request is submitted, an email message is sent to the user. To enable this function, when installing or upgrading to 2.4.0-M3, the administrator must configure mail server setting in the gnizr-config.xml.
Here are some typical SMTP configurations.
Policy-Driven User Registration
In the previous releases, gnizr administrators can implement one of two user registration policy -- (1) anyone can register, and (2) only the admin can create new accounts. Starting in 2.4.0-M3, a third option is available.
The new option allows anyone with a valid email address to register, but in order for their accounts to be activated, they require explicitly approval from the administrator (i.e., gnizr).
Here is a detail description of gnizr's User Registration policy.
This feature requires the administrator to configure mail server setting in the gnizr-config.xml.
New Bookmarklet for the Internet Explorer 6
Some enterprise users having trouble using the bookmarklet that comes with gnizr in the IE6 browser. David Hochman kindly sent us a fix to this issue. Part of his fix has been included in 2.4.0-M3.
In the "help" page, users can find this experimental bookmarklet. We have tested in IE6, and it worked much better than ours in the previous releases.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 2 Release
Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 2 is now available for download.
See also: Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 1
UI Cleaning and Polish
Users should notice some UI changes in this release. Improved the layout of bookmarks. The display of bookmark information is more compact. Clicking on the bookmark title will take you to the description page of the bookmark. We've also updated the layout of the login page and the registration page. Depending on how the registration policy is configured, different information is shown to users who don't already have an account.
We also added more instruction text in different "settings" pages. This should help new users and new admin to get started with the system.
Search Term Suggestion
To improve users' search experience, we have added the Search Term Suggestion function. As you entering text in the search box, a drop-down menu will show you search suggestions. You can read more about its design and implementation on the wiki page.
Improved Bookmark Search
In the past release, queries entered in the search box are matched against only the "title" of the saved bookmarks in the system. In this release, we've improved the index and search algorithm. Texts entered are automatically matched against "title", "tags" and "notes" of the saved bookmarks.
Also, the OpenSearch engine implementation for "bookmarks saved by you" and "bookmarks saved by others" have distinctive behavior. If a user is logged in, searching in "bookmarks saved by others" will search within bookmarks saved by all users in the community, but automatically exclude those saved by the logged-in user. On the other hand, the "bookmarks saved by you" search engine only searches within those bookmarks that are saved by the logged-in user.
Field-based search (add a prefix term to the search query):
- Download: gnizr-2.4.0-M2.zip
- How to install or upgrade
- Configure gnizr-config.xml for 2.4.0
- What has changed
See also: Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 1
UI Cleaning and Polish
Users should notice some UI changes in this release. Improved the layout of bookmarks. The display of bookmark information is more compact. Clicking on the bookmark title will take you to the description page of the bookmark. We've also updated the layout of the login page and the registration page. Depending on how the registration policy is configured, different information is shown to users who don't already have an account.
We also added more instruction text in different "settings" pages. This should help new users and new admin to get started with the system.
Search Term Suggestion
To improve users' search experience, we have added the Search Term Suggestion function. As you entering text in the search box, a drop-down menu will show you search suggestions. You can read more about its design and implementation on the wiki page.
Improved Bookmark Search
In the past release, queries entered in the search box are matched against only the "title" of the saved bookmarks in the system. In this release, we've improved the index and search algorithm. Texts entered are automatically matched against "title", "tags" and "notes" of the saved bookmarks.
Also, the OpenSearch engine implementation for "bookmarks saved by you" and "bookmarks saved by others" have distinctive behavior. If a user is logged in, searching in "bookmarks saved by others" will search within bookmarks saved by all users in the community, but automatically exclude those saved by the logged-in user. On the other hand, the "bookmarks saved by you" search engine only searches within those bookmarks that are saved by the logged-in user.
Field-based search (add a prefix term to the search query):
- "title:" -- search within bookmark titles
- "tag:" -- search within tags
- "notes:" -- search within bookmark notes
- "text:" -- search within all the above fields (default)
Friday, April 4, 2008
Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 1 Release
Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 1 is now available for download.
New Features
Super Faster Bookmark Search. We've added Lucene search engine to power gnizr bookmark search. The result is an significant performance gain in bookmark search.
Improved OpenSearch logic. We've simplified the search interface by collapsing all search functions into a single OpenSearch function. A single search box is displayed on the top of the page. A user can search his/her bookmarks, bookmarks saved by other users, and one or more third-party OpenSearch engines on the Web.
Firefox Browser Search Plugin. Users can add a search plugin to the Firefox or IE 7 browser. They can quickly search bookmarks in gnizr without needing to go to the gnizr main page.
New 'icon' Machine Tag. Users can label bookmarks with colorful icons using a new machine tag called 'gn:icon'. Users can use this machine tag to express their personal opinions about the bookmarks or explicitly describe the kind of media content that is described in the bookmarks. On the "add bookmark" page, we've implemented a Machine Tag Helper UI for adding these 'icon' machine tags.
Upgrading from Gnizr 2.3.0
If you want to try out gnizr 2.4 on the top of your existing gnizr 2.3.0 database, follow these instructions:
- Backup your existing database.
- Follow the standard upgrade procedures, except that you don't need to upgrade your database. Skip all steps described in the section "Upgrade database tables and stored procedures". Gnizr 2.4.0 M1 runs on the same database schema and store procedure as gnizr 2.3.0.
- After copying the gnizr webapp into your Tomcat, edit gnizr-config.xml using these instructions. Note that new configuration parameters have been added in 2.4.0.
- Start Tomcat.
- Go to you gnizr web application and login as 'gnizr' the super user.
- Manually create a search index database for bookmark search. Go to "settings". Under "Administration", click on "Rebuild search index". Follow instructions on the page.
- Done.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Gnizr 2.3.0 Final Release
Gnizr 2.3.0 Final Release is now available for download.
We thank those users who have reported issues and given us feedbacks. Without them, the open source gnizr project would not be possible.
Feature Highlights
Using SKOS for Search Term Suggestion
Administrator can define a set of tag relationships to assist the search of bookmarks. Tag relationships are defined using SKOS vocabulary -- narrower, broader and related-to. Read more.
OpenSearch Support
Gnizr users can search bookmarks and other resources on the Web under a unified search interface, which is similar to that of the A9 search engine. Administrator can customize the set of OpenSearch services that are available to gnizr users. Read more.
Improved User Interface
We try hard to improve gnizr user experience. In this release, we made an effort to improve tag relationship management, tag suggestion and auto-complete, machine tag helper, and gnizr bookmarklet.
What's Next (gnizr 2.4.0)
We've started the development of the next generation of gnizr. Couple major features are under development:
- Integrate Apache Lucene search
- Search gnizr via Firefox search plugin
- New machine tags for describing bookmark content (video, photo, audio etc.)
We expect to release gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 1 in the next couple weeks.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Gnizr 2.3.0 Release Candidate 2
Gnizr 2.3.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available for download.
In this RC release, we fixed couple bugs. One of which is related to running RSS robot. We discovered that the Java thread that runs the robot is not properly terminated when the hosting Servelet Container is shutdown. Fixes have been added to the code. If you use 2.3.0 RC2 and still experience "dangling" threads when your Servlet Container is shutdown., please let us know.
We also updated Java API documentation and a Wiki page that describes the implementation of gnizr User Authentication. We will continue to improve our developer documentations.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Gnizr 2.3.0 RC 1 Build Failure
A developer reported to us that he is unable to build gnizr 2.3.0 RC1 after checking out the source from the SVN. We looked into the problem and discovered that the problem is caused by JUnit test failures in building the gnizr-robot package.
This problem has been reported to the bug tracking system: issue 46.
We will fix this problem in the upcoming gnizr 2.3.0 RC2 release. For now, if you are building RC1 from the source, use 'mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true install' to skip all JUnit tests.
This problem has been reported to the bug tracking system: issue 46.
We will fix this problem in the upcoming gnizr 2.3.0 RC2 release. For now, if you are building RC1 from the source, use 'mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true install' to skip all JUnit tests.
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