About a year ago Pedro wrote a Greasemonkey script to add comments from PostGenomic.com to table of contents of scientific journals. Noel extended it with support for Chemical blogspace (see also this earlier item). Now, the later website is maintained by me, and I extended the aggregator software with molecule support, for example to show hot molecules on the frontpage (at some point my patches will be backported into mainstream. Euan, why not invite me to London HQ in, say, June?).

So, when we can show comments from blogosphere for journal articles, why can’t we do that for molecules too? Sure we can. Just needs some hacking. Right, and done that today. The scripts works for PubChem:

Works for any <a href> element with an URL to PubChem like http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pccompound&term=%22InChI=1/CH4/h1H4%22[InChI]. BTW, while the URL is not very readable, this might actually be a good way to hide InChIs, though I am sure Google will not index this InChI either.

And it also works for semantically marked up InChI’s (using either microformats or RDFa):

You’ll notice here that it is friendly with my Sechemtic script to make links to Google and PubChem.

The tools to make this happen involves a new Greasemonkey script (based on Noels code), and a few patches to the Postgenomic.com software. The user script can be downloaded here. An entry on the Blue Obelisk userscript page will follow; check that page for more goodies.

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2007/05/cb-comments-for-inchis.html.