I start to become really interesting when we use these technologies to improve things. I am still not sure people will like the command line nature, but at least I will be a happy user. This is the setting: I’m blogging about some chemistry, like to add an InChI (or InChIKey) and add that cool sechemtic markup people have been blogging about, but I do not know (or want to know) the HTML details for that.

Well, no worries, no more. Here comes sechemtic-inchi (installer here)!

Step 1

I type in the InChI I want in my blog (example showing that of methane):

And, I select the InChI:

After which I hit the Ubiquity shortcut (ALT-SPACE on Linux) and I type sechemtic-inchi:

And, viola, there is my RDFa HTML code for chemistry:

Now, with only minor amounts of fantasy, you can imagine where this is going: SMILES, InChiKey, etc, etc. Hook it up with chemistry webservices to autoconvert SMILES to InChIKeys, and Bob’s your uncle.

What I am actually interested in, is being able to use this command in a blog editing environment; however, I have not managed to get that working in one command. And because I am apparently not able to put in two ubiquity commands in blog items, you need to go to this page.

Second warning. I have only tried them with Ubiquity 0.1, not 0.1.1, or even later.

For the curious, the script looks like:

CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
  name: "resolve-doi",
  homepage: "http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/",
  author: { name: "Egon Willighagen", email: "egon.willighagen@gmail.com"},
  description: "Resolves a DOI into a URL",
  license: "GPL",
  takes: {"doi": noun_arb_text},

  preview: function( pblock, doi ) {
    var msg = 'Inserts a URL for the DOI: ${doi}';
    var d = doi.text || CmdUtils.getSelection();
    pblock.innerHTML = CmdUtils.renderTemplate(msg, {doi: d});
  },

  execute: function( doi ) {
    var msg = '<a href="http://dx.doi.org/${doi}">${doi}</a>';
    var d = doi.text || CmdUtils.getSelection();
    var newText = CmdUtils.renderTemplate(msg, {doi: d});
    CmdUtils.setSelection(newText);
  }
})

Comments on this code most welcome! It’s GPL. Details can be found in this tutorial and examples in Rajarshi’s blog.