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The new TRIP

Around 11.30 today the new version of TRIP went live. But what’s so different? Lots of new features most designed to help users locate the information they need quickly; these include:

  • Snippets. These are the 2-3 lines of summary text from the returned document. These have been demonstrated to significantly improve the recall of appropriate search results.
  • Conclusions. Where documents have conclusions we have designed our system to ‘grab them’ and allow them to be displayed within TRIP. This has numerous advantages including a significant reduction in bandwidth, very useful if you don’t have the ‘luxury’ of broadband access.
  • Advanced search. This has been redesigned to allow a significant improvement in usability in this function.
  • Comments. We love the BMJ’s ‘rapid responses’ so why not allow TRIP users to share their views with the wider TRIP community?
  • RSS feeds. This feature allows you to ‘save’ a search as an RSS feed. If new material is added that appears in the top 50 search results for the same search, its outputted via RSS.
  • Memory. We’ve doubled the capacity of our servers memory, this should bring about a rapid increase in speed.
  • Redesign. A mixed blessing this one! Basically, we need to increase our income vai Google ads. As it stands not enough people are clicking on the ads so our income from these is not sufficient to pay for costs and fuel our significant development plans. By making the ads more prominent, the theory is, that more people will click on them….

I’m pretty chuffed, I hope you are too!

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In around 12 hours….

…the new version of TRIP will start to be deployed. The whole deployment process will take approximately 2 hours. So by lunchtime (British Summer Time) it should be live.

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PMID.US

I was sure I’d blogged this, but I can’t find it – so here goes!

PubMed URLs tend to be really long. The typical URL can be http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=17540531

Using this site http://pmid.us allows you to simply add the PMID to the end of the URL e.g. http://pmid.us/17540531

If you click on the last URL you’ll get taken to an article that features TRIP. In this Belgium paper clinicians searched 4 databases (one of which was TRIP) and the authors found very favourable results. I’ve ordered the full-text and will report more when it arrives.

Two other mentions of TRIP recently:

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Joy Division Oven Gloves

A new feature – inappropriate titles for blog posts!

I was going to call this post ‘stuff’ but felt that was pretty dismal/boring.

Anyway, onto the post. Three things to report:

1) Today’s Google blog linked to something called a binary clock. I was intrigued and visited the Think Geek online store and discovered what it was (click here). I want one!

2) I came across this wonderful looking “HEALTH 2.0: USER-GENERATED HEALTHCARE“. I’d love to go but not sure I can justify the time and costs for a single day…

3) The next upgrade for TRIP is taking shape. Yes, we’re still waiting to release the latest upgrade (hopefully next week – I’ve heard that before) but we like to think ahead. The main features will be linked in with the gwagle experiment (see previous post). The main planned features will be user-added content, enhanced My-TRIP, content tagging (with associated tag clouds). We may even add a scoring mechanism whereby users can give a score (based on something nebulous such as ‘clinical usefulness’. It may not sound much but it will represent a significant move in TRIP’s development.

As for the title of the blog post, see this YouTube clip. I was at that concert and the clip doesn’t do the song justice!

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Lessons from Gwagle

Gwagle has been interesting! A few people have used it a lot but mostly people haven’t. As such we’ve had little feedback. Being an alpha test I’m not overly upset by this as that is what the alpha was about – testing perceptions etc. My own conclusion being that, as it stands, there is little obvious gain for busy clinicians to actually use the site. It’s also, probably, a fairly abstract concept for many of those exposed to it. So where to from here?

As it stands, I don’t feel Gwagle (the website) will be the priority. However, Gwagle (as a web-service) will provide the backbone to added functionality to TRIP. To begin with, when the latest deployment to TRIP is released, there will be a ‘comments’ function. This function will be using the Gwagle ‘engine’ to work. Also, comments on TRIP will help populate Gwagle.

The next step is to allow users to add content to TRIP. I see lots of really useful information that doesn’t fit into the ‘usual’ TRIP editorial/upload mechanisms. At the moment I add it to Gwagle (as do other people). As you can see from the ‘latest’ link in Gwagle (click here) there is lots of ‘good stuff’. Yesterday, I added an awful lots of podcasts – there is currently no mechanism to add podcasts to TRIP.

So, this facility will appear as TRIP functionality (as it will be) but it’ll have the Gwagle engine to get it to work. There is also no reason why other groups/organisations can’t use the Gwagle engine to power their own ‘products’.

Moving back to TRIP, the ability to add content will happen, hopefully before the end of the year, and will also incorporate other features to help assess ‘quality’ of the added content (think digg but not focussed on news!).

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The new version of TRIP

I think I’ve been saying this for an age now – but the new version is very close to deployment! I’ve got the final development version to test and then a slight design change to be added. If this doesn’t happen by the end of next week I’ll be pretty frustrated!

With any complex web deployments there are unforeseen problems. This time the biggest one was my enthusiasm to alter the specification midway through. Initially, there was no intention of allowing users to add comments to TRIP. However, our experience of the alpha test of Gwagle indicated a need to make that concept less abstract (I’ll say more on that in my next post). As such a comments function was added. So that just throws things a bit and add delays…..

I’m confident that it’ll be worth waiting for!

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TRIP is back!

After what seems like an age (certainly over 24 hours) TRIP is back! The official reason from the web-people is:

“The problem was caused by the number of maximum connections to the database being exceeded. We don’t know why as yet, but are investigating as a matter of urgency.”

Not 100% sure what that means, possibly linked to our increased popularity! Talking of which we’re currently upgrading our servers to double the capacity

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TRIP Down

Boo-hiss!

It appears TRIP has been mis-behaving over the weekend and the error has spilt over into today! We’ve got our techies looking into it and we hope to have normal service resumed surely.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused!

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NRR and Google Earth Mash-up

I was delighted to receive an e-mail from Hazim at Update Software highlighting their rather lovely new feature on the National Research Register. The NRR is:

“…a database of ongoing and recently completed research projects funded by, or of interest to, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS).”

In a nutshell it allows you to search for completed or ongoing research in a particular topic. The results can then be added to a map of the UK (up to a maximum of 100 results). Below is a picture of the 76 ongoing, single-centre research projects, looking at ovarian cancer.

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