Daily Archives: May 23, 2012

Is it as good for you as it is for me?

As you can see, Scienceblogs.com has a new look. There is no more left sidebar and the right sidebar looks different, the cute banners different blogs had is replaced with a new standardized banner usually with a picture of the blogger. The 24 hour page and some other bits are (depending on when you read this) not functioning yet but will be soon. And, up there in the upper right is the National Geographic Brand.

I no long have an “about” page but pages can be created and I will eventually do that. I think pages will be accessible from a drop down or menu or something on the right sidebar.

The little icon that goes with each post is currently my mug from Gravitar (I think). But, that can be adjusted. For instance, say I insert a picture and select “use as feature image.” I just did that with a picture of Julia SCUBA diving in the Dominican Republic. Maybe that picture will appear instead of my face. Maybe it will appear in the post. Maybe it will appear on the front cover of National Geographic!

This new blog platform is WordPress and I’ve used WordPress quite bit. I use it at The X Blog, and I use it a 10,000 Birds and I use it a Greg Laden’s Blog, and I’ve used it elsewhere. But as you may know, WordPress is a powerful tool with lots of capabilities, and no two installations are alike (well, there probably are identical installs, but not that I’ve seen). I’ve never used the “featured image” thing before ….

One of the great things about WordPress, and for WordPress users this may seem totally stupid but the old Scienceblogs platform did not have this, is the ability to click the word “edit” (or a symbol) on a post you are looking at and suddenly you are in edit mode. This did not happen in the old Scienceblogs platform … you had to find the post on a list of posts, then edit it. This means that is was trivially easy though somewhat time consuming for me to go through a bunch of categories last night and fix them up so they make more sense. See my excellent category list on the right side bar!

There have been some problems reported. Please poke around the site and see if anything goes wrong, and if you survive whatever goes wrong, let me know.

I will be adjusting commenting to allow only approved commenters. This means that the first time you comment, you use your name and something that looks like an email address, and I’ll find it in a waiting queue, and approve it. For those of you who have not had to do this in the recent past, I apologize, but this is the only way to keep out that idiot from Madison Wisconsin and others.

I am not using threaded comments.

Let me know what you think!


Photo courtesy of Holly Tappen