AutoBib: a quick and dirty hack to keep your publications up to date

Like most academics I struggled with keeping my personal homepage, my group homepage, and my BIB file up to date with all the papers we publish. Instead of allowing the individual pages go vastly out of date, I created this quick and ugly hack to create bib files and static html pages for all different targets.

Initial setup

• All the magic is in the poorly documented genpubs.py.
• Create a folder files/ with all PDFs in it (named YYVenue.pdf, e.g., 18CCS.pdf)
• Create a publications.xml with all your publications in it (follow the somewhat documented example.xml)
• Create a template.html that fits your homepage(s).

Adding a publication

• Place the PDF in the files/ folder.
• Update the publications.xml with the new publication.
• Create a bib file: ./genpubs.py -T bib -p publications.xml -o publications.bib
• Create a html file: ./genpubs.py -t hexhive.html -p publications.xml -o ~/repos/hexhive/publications/index.html
• Locally, I do run all these commands as part of scripts that pull the homepages, generate new html files, and rsync the different directories/files to make sure all is updated.

Q&A

• Why? Yes, it's somewhat over-engineered but I've been using these scripts since 2014 years and after the initial coding they have saved me a lot of time.

Author

Mathias Payer

Dual-licensed under the GPL and the whatever license: if it breaks, you got to keep the pieces. If it is helpful to you, buy me a beer the next time we meet.