It has been drawn to our attention that there have been problems with the RSS feeds on OR. Specifically that they’re working backwards. Or in other words, the earliest submitted items are appearing first. 

But no more, it’s been fixed. A simple change has been made to the configuration file to draw the correct ordering. As intended, RSS feeds will, from here on, display items as they are added.

And now for the good news.

In the same build we’ve made a couple of significant changes to the service. The first change is the addition of the full download to EndNote or Reference Manager options. At the top of each item page you’ll see the button to ‘Export to’ and a drop down list to choose the citation manager required. It’ll even work if you have that really nifty Firefox* extension Zotero. Actually, it works really well on Zotero.

For the time being, this option will remain hidden to all but administrators while we’re fishing for feedback. Once we know that people are happy and the metadata is appearing accurately, we’ll push the feature live to all. We do also have the option to switch this feature on or off.

With this in place we can begin to investigate the reverse process, adding content from EndNote or Reference Manager files.

The second change relates to the search. For the time being you should notice nothing, other than it’s running up to about 25% faster than before. But underneath, lurks a pupa of code, waiting for an interface to arrive so that it can reveal itself to the world. This code will allow us to add new sort options to search results, as we now have with the browse, including limiting search by date, which is one of our most requested feature requests. I’ll add a further update when this butterfly of search takes wing (which will be as soon as we’ve finished the interface).

 
*It’s not that we’re biased or anything, but we do prefer Firefox as a browser.