So, the mysterious strings of digits that I wrote about the other day seem to be part of a class assignment from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Students are being asked to go read and comment on blogs, and the random digits are individual student identifiers. This makes sense given the form and […]
Category: Maintenance
Big Blog News: I’m Now Also at Forbes
I hinted once or twice that I had news coming, and this is it: I’ve signed up to be a blog contributor at Forbes writing about, well, the sorts of things I usually write about. I’m pretty excited about the chance to connect with a new audience; the fact that they’re paying me doesn’t hurt, […]
Spring Break
This week is Union’s spring break, and like basically everything associated with Union’s academic calendar, it’s too short. I have to turn in my Winter term grades today, and next Monday is the start of my Spring term class. I also find myself in a place right now were every little thing is pissing me […]
Spiffy New Digs, Suggestions Wanted
So, as you may or may not have noticed, ScienceBlogs has gotten a makeover. If you read via RSS, you might not notice anything, but if you come to the blog itself, you’ll see a new look. The previous three-column layout is gone, and posts on the front page now show only short excerpts and […]
Transitional Technical Difficulties
As mentioned previously, the crack technical team at ScienceBlogs HQ is working on shifting us from our creaky Movable Type system to a shiny new WordPress system. Part of that process involves moving all the old posts over, which has been done… sort of. At present, any post since April 18 has not been moved, […]
We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties
Since I’ve gotten a bunch of questions via email and Twitter, this probably deserves its own post: Yes, I’m aware that the ScienceBlogs front page and the Last 24 Hours and ScienceBlogs Select RSS feeds have gone dead. Here’s the story: The crack technical team and ScienceBlogs Headquarters is working around the clock to upgrade […]
Another Year, Another Quasi-Hiatus
Classes for the 2011-2012 academic year start tomorrow, which means that blogging will come to a nearly complete stop. I have an exceptionally heavy teaching load this term (deliberately, because I’m developing a new course in the winter term, and FutureSibling! is due in November), and it’s become clear that there are not enough hours […]
Ba-Ba-Ba BAAAA Ba, Ba-Ba-Ba BAA Ba-Ba Ba-Ba Ba (BOM BOM): National Geographic and ScienceBlogs
It’s been in the works for a while, but a couple of days ago the news got out via the usual combination of rumor-mongering and confidentiality-breaking that makes blogdom such a joy to work with (seriously, you want to know why it’s hard to get mainstream media types to take bloggers seriously, or keep bloggers […]
2010: The Year in Blog
Because I’m sure everybody is as fascinated by blog stats as I am, here’s the traffic to this blog for 2010, in graphical form: In case you can’t numerically integrate that in your head, I’ll tell you that the total number of pageviews represented there is a bit more than 908,000. We have yet to […]
Replacement for Delicious?
As has been mentioned in countless places over the last few days, Yahoo plans to shut down Delicious, the social bookmark service that lots of people use for lots of things. My interest in it is pretty narrow, but important for this blog: I use Delicious to generate the quasi-automatic daily Links Dump postings here. […]