Blog posts

[historicist]

I'm just beginning to populate my Bookends database with blog posts, using the "Internet" category. I'd be curious to learn how other users are handling these, and what practices are best to follow. For instance, where do you put the name of the blog?

I'll be citing mostly using Chicago or MLA styles. So details like Date of Access are also important.

yours
Michael

[ozean]

One thing that I would recommend when you use a lot of blog posts in your database is to (a) make sure that you save an archive of the website along with the reference (i.e. not only a link), and (b) ponder if it might not make sense to create a new reference type for blog posts, as this might make things easier, since blogs have their own features which make them somewhat different from normal websites (i.e. post date and time being more important, and comments and their number being of potential relevance, etc.).

[macula]

In principle this question always depends on the bibliographic style you're working with. Building a style-agnostic bibliographic database is a tall order, because different styles sometimes require different fields or differently formatted data. I believe that the first bibliography manager to address this problem, with an additional abstraction layer before what we currently call "fields," would be a major contribution. One could imagine different "pre-processors" (or "filters" or "formatters") plugged into the raw bibliographic data to convert it into style-specific fields. For example, "raw" dates could be entered by the user in ISO8601 format (2014-05-29), then formatted differently by one or more filters depending on the bibliography style they will be fed into (29 May 2014, 29.5.2014, Spring 2014, …). Other formatters could address capitalization issues, title-subtitle divisions, numbers vs. roman numerals, style-specific fields… It could all work graphically, similarly to Automator or Alfred workflows, and even be scriptable (Python/Applescript).

Of course, daydreaming is easy, coding is difficult.