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
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OK so the “features image” simply becomes a big giant image at the top of the post. I wonder what else it will do?
I am happy to hear that image uploads are working for some.
Are you unable to upload images?
A bit early to believe it’s not the user (or the user’s client), but
the rss feed isn’t loading for me (Firefox Live Bookmark).
I’ll give it a few days.
I only get broken jpeg pictures; I cannot upload my profile pic, my banner pic, images in the post, etc. I actually used twitter (ha!) to host my pics for the migration post I wrote earlier today.
Also, I see you successfully used the excerpt tag; it did not take for me. I wonder if I did something wrong, or if it’s just hosed on my end.
@gruebait
From what I can tell, the RSS feeds changed over from feedburner to a scienceblog internal feed, e.g scienceblogs.com/gregladen/feed/
I did not use the excerpt tag. What you see happened automatically.
This needs a:
“<>”
navigation when viewing the entire post + comments.
Its a pain in the ass to click “Back” and then scroll down to the next post summary, then click it.
Aaargh! Forgot about HTML hating angle brackets.
Between the angle brackets should be:
Previous Post Title Next Post Title
It looks snazzy. I get a big “featured pic” at the top of the post too. Your nice face photo is still there.
But like others I don’t like the way it breaks your posts and I’d like to see the post titles for next and previous posts. I usually use the back button, but I like to see what the consecutive posts are.
Whoa, my comment posted right away. Either you are really fast or I’m special!
You’re special, Lynn!
But in a good way!
I was on Ethan’s blog and tried to use the drop down to come here, no go. Had to go back to the home page then use drop down to get here. Better than yesterday, drop down didn’t work at all.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the info!
I’m probably not a great beta tester, but at least I’ll see if I can still post.
Many things still don’t work.
E.g. despite some blogs getting selected when changing the picklist, most don’t.
Evolution blog, despite having one person commenting eats every other comment on his blog.
It’s just a really crappy system.
Eats comments?
As in “you post, the page refreshes, but you don’t get a post in the blog. No error, no problems apparent, no post appears.
Jason over at Evolution Blog is feeling lonely because nobody can talk to him.