Part of being a student is lots of reading: sometimes it’s useful stuff, mostly background noise. The papers are manged by a bibliography manager (which is just a fancy database), and that stores it’s data in the very standard BibTeX format.

Part of that bibliography is now viewable directly in a nice tabular format. Not all the fields are displayed and the references are rather ‘raw’ out of the DB but it’s enough for now, if you order by the timestamp you can see what’s been recently read. While such a list seems simple, it’s been a battle to get it working. The actual parsing is done with a PHP module Structures/BibTex.php and the table with a jQuery addon TableSorter. Just getting all of that to play nice was ‘interesting’. And then having got it all working on my local system, getting it onto my hosting servers was awkward since installing PHP modules wasn’t too easy either. Managed to install PEAR and then the required module in my bit of the server. Next will be some better filtering on the tables, perhaps the ability to see any comments I’ve written and an RSS feed.

Not entirely sure its a good use of time but, sometimes I need to do some programming not reading.