As a followup, let me add a few things about the move:
- If you read this blog through a feed there may be issues. Please update your feed to be http://feeds.feedburner.com/BadAstronomyBlog. Most folks should already have that as the feed address, but check your feed reader to make sure. And yeah, I know people with the wrong feed will have to come here first to find that out.
- The layout and font and all that are the same on all the Discover blogs. The Discover Hive Overmind wanted to get everyone moved over first, and then tweak things. So it’ll look this way for a while, but I’m hoping we can fiddle with it soon. They’ve been very open to suggestions.
- The sidebar layout is not set in stone, and I can fiddle with it. The blogroll is gone for now, and I want to reinstall it. But I need to ponder a bit on what to put there. The ad stays, and the About Me thing stays. I like the links to previous posts and latest comments, but after that… hmmmm.
- Thanks to everyone who has shown support! I really appreciate it. And if you didn’t, feh. I’m happy.
- Regular posting will presume shortly. Of course, there’s a backlog of stuff to get through now…
July 1st, 2008 at 6:33 pm
TWO WHOLE DAYS WITHOUT MY BABBLOG FIX!!!
The withdrawal was almost unbearable.
Glad to have you back!
July 1st, 2008 at 6:34 pm
I would imagine that regular posting will resume shortly, and presume little
(typo, point 5)
July 1st, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I’d reconsider putting the huge StumbleUpon block at the top of each post; it clashes with the new theme. I don’t know if SU has a smaller logo you could use, but if they do, I’d go with that.
July 1st, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Hm well on the one hand, I hate it. Your address is now no longer as cool so it’s harder to get to.
On the other hand, your old site design made my eyes burn with pain and this one is much nicer.
July 1st, 2008 at 6:47 pm
The internets have been downright quiet without you around, Phil. I’m sure I’m not alone in my withdrawal.
July 1st, 2008 at 6:59 pm
I’m hoping that now on this new site I won’t always get caught by the spam filter every single time I post 0_0. That was annoying. So… testingtesting 1234. Can anyone hear this;)?
July 1st, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Yay:). It worked.
Oh and BA, 2 different RSS addies should work. The one you posted (http://feeds.feedburner.com/BadAstronomyBlog) and a new one that discover uses (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/feed/). The second one works a little bit better with the simple built in RSS reader in FF3, but other than that there is no difference.
July 1st, 2008 at 7:20 pm
I like the new set-up. It’s much cleaner with the ad being at the top of the right column. The color could be tweaked, but it looks really nice!
July 1st, 2008 at 7:22 pm
BTW, click on the Discover Banner, and Phil made the fron cover. Way to go!
July 1st, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Phil, now that your blog is moving onto bigger things, any chance you’re going to keep some action going on your original site? Some of the movie reviews and general “debunkments” are great stuff. It was your movie reviews that turned me onto critical thinking!
July 1st, 2008 at 7:46 pm
# I’m hoping we can fiddle with it soon. They’ve been very open to suggestions.
# The sidebar layout is not set in stone, and I can fiddle with it.
So, you’ll be like Wicked Uncle Ernie… fiddling about, fiddle, fiddle, fiddle….
J/P=?
July 1st, 2008 at 7:58 pm
This on step for the bablog
One giant leap for blogkind. -:)
July 1st, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Phil:
The font is a little hard to read on my 17″ Mac. If the point size was a scosh larger and maybe black instead of grey it would be easier on these 58 year old eyes…
Otherwise, “don’t go changing…” If it ain’t broke…
Rich in Charlottesville
July 1st, 2008 at 8:30 pm
I know the overlords feel that brand presence is important, but for someone who NEEDS to run at 800×600 resolution, the logo takes up a full 50% of the landing space…
July 1st, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Interesting. I hope this works out well for you. If nothing else, I hope they pay for your bandwidth.
Just one suggestion: increase the font size. The CSS is overriding my browser settings and I have to manually increase the font with every page load to make it readable.
July 1st, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Congratulations on the move!
I hope you can influence Discover to print less drivel like http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/soul-search or at least you can spend some blog entries mocking them when they do. They publish just barely few enough of that sort of article that I am still a subscriber.
July 1st, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Very cool my friend! A lovely new home and the discovery site is well known in the school system!
A great place to be and they are very wise to have you here.
July 1st, 2008 at 9:42 pm
I remember spending many a lunch hour in the high school library reading Discover magazine. Great to have it come back into my life in such a pleasantly surprising way. Good luck in the new home Phil!
July 1st, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Very pretty layout, Phil. Is this going to affect your embedding vid candies?
July 1st, 2008 at 10:44 pm
How many of us used to hide Discover magazines under our mattresses as teenagers! LOL
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:49 am
I found it very convenient to have a direct link from the BABlog to the BAUT forum. I’d usually go to the blog first and then look around the forums. It would be nice to have that link on here again.
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:07 am
Okay, a couple of nits I have:
Let me add to the chorus of contrast - white is so bright and black is, well, gray.
Also, the blog Search function returns Page 1, but Older Entries returns a 404 error.
Best wishes in your new creative home.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:03 am
Nice that it retains all my login details - usually by the time I’ve typed all that in I’ve forgotten exactly how I wanted to phrase that magnificently succinctly worded comment that I just had to submit to posterity before it disappeared back into the murky depths of my ageing cranium…
er, where was I?
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:57 am
Couple things:
I’m tickled that you’re happy with your new home, Dr. BA.
I’m thrilled to be out of blog comment purgatory.
I am kinda missing the old logo, but I’ll live… temporarily.
That’s not the feed address I’m using (which is working fine, btw) When you moved, the first thing I did was have Sage scope out a feed for me. It gave me this:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/feed/
I’m thrilled to be out of blog comment purgatory. That was pretty annoying after a while.
I love the recent comments thing (though I’d like to see it hold ten or fifteen), and its lack was probably the one thing I really really disliked about the old blog.
The page loads much faster here, and that has to be good.
Did I mention how thrilled I am to be out of blog comment purgatory?
Kisses!
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:58 am
I recall that at the TAM 6 cocktail party, you recognized my name as one which always got caught in the BABlog’s spam filter. If my comments go through successfully here, I guess I will be entirely unremarkable.
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:11 am
Nice job pulling the same feed address over Phil!
I look forward to more astronosnarkydoomness.
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:23 am
Definitely seconding (fiftthing?) the typeface and text colour comments. Only 52 here, but the eyes have been miserable since 7 - and this doesn’t much help.
Thanks to the work webpages (which are far worse!) I can deal with it I have to - but would rather something more solid and less cute. The colour differential between text and links isn’t all that stand-outish either.
Good luck with the new digs.
JC
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:24 am
Assuming I don’t get caught in the spam filters
Observation and questions
In IE, all the text is right up against the left of the frame. Have not yet got to see how this renders in Firefox
Does anyone know what the score will be about the BA application in FaceBook?
Will the comments allow html or BB code and will links be allowd?
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:27 am
I have to second the font thing. The blog is a bit hard to read at my usual 1600*1024. The font you’d been using on BABLog was fine. Richard B Drumm’s suggestions are good. If the background has to be gleaming white, the font needs to be black and just a little bit larger.
As has also been pointed out, the Discover logo is a little big.
The rest seems to be okay, so far, there shouldn’t be too much change-shock involved in this move.
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:30 am
The font size is okay on my screen, but black would be better.
I miss the BA logo.
Maybe it’s my screen/settings, but there is no margin along the lefthand side. It makes it hard to read, it looks crowded, I’m afraid I might miss a letter or two, and… doesn’t it hurt the words to be scrunched against the side of the monitor like that?
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:31 am
Oh, yeah, Sticks is right. In firefox, the text is right up against the left edge of the browser window, just like Sticks reports in IE. The text needs to be nudged to the right a bit, maybe as much as an eighth of an inch.
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:04 am
Geez, that was bright. And I’m colour blind. End of an era. Missing it all ready. ;-(
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:18 am
Ad, what ad? Everyone uses Firefox, right?
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:17 am
Grats on the move (though I think I’ve already said that)!
I’d just like to chime in with those asking for a better color scheme. The font size is fine for me now, but when I get a flat-screen monitor at home at the end of the summer, I imagine the text will go small for me, too - and I’m 24!
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:10 pm
I also have the text at the left margin problem. The font size now is better for me - it was always too large before.
It still takes a really long time to load, though, just like it did before. That could use tweaking.
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Oh, site design. Looks nice, except it could do with a larger font/nicer CSS - I like my blogs having nicely wrapped text blocks, it makes for easier reading.
And there is still no Preview. SIGH!!!
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Looks fine in Opera with a small but decent margin on the left, plus Opera has a handy zoom feature which I would be lost without. Firefox - bah!
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Timestamping in the replies seems a bit off. I left one in the “boson” thread and it wound up stamped an hour earlier than some that were already there. Unless the LHC has created a magic particle that moved me back in time…
Post numbers would be nice. The old blog had this except it never worked, at least for me in FireFox.
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:36 pm
On the edge thing; dunno, in my Firefox text goes up to the block area, but the block starts a few millimeter in.
I tried to disable CSS by using the “No Style” FF option, and then the block starts right at the edge (but the text is indented and larger, of course) as it should. So I blame CSS for the discrepancies.
But do you know; the default comments are numbered. WANT!
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I am on vacation in Colorado and wandered over to the blog and was surprised by the move. But the blog looks great on my 17″ Mac Powerbook in OmniWeb. I did a site preference of text 130% of normal. Very nice to read.
I very much appreciate the links to recent posts. Whatever you do, please leave them. It makes it much easier for those of us who read your blog casually (regularly but not necessarily every day) to find items of interest.
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
The text appearing at the very left edge of the screen is a browser window width issue. At widths greater than ~990 the space between the left browser window edge and the text will progressively increase with greater width.
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Thoughts?
(*snicker*)
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:44 pm
The old blog was finky and I had to stop loading all the posts before they got through (which took awhile). This format, however, loads the whole page right off with no problem. NOTE: the left margin is beyond my screen on both of my machines.
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Congratulations Phil!
I can only see this as validation of your work and an opportunity to broaden your audience.
I hope it’s a sign of good things to come from Discover Magazine in general.
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Please keep the Baut Forum!
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:26 am
Sorry Dr Phil Plait The Bad Astronomer but I liked the old site better.
“In IE, all the text is right up against the left of the frame.
Yep, gotta second (or third or five-hundreth) that.
Text here too small & not as good with grey versus black & white - agreed too.
Still no EDIT or preview?? Gosh-darn and dang-nabbit!(I’spose the silly no-swearing rule stays .. Sigh.) The one thing that would’ve made the old site perfect & this new site with all its other imperfections doesn’t even fix that!
Sorry BA I don’t mean to sound ungrateful but I think this is a backwards step. Any change of changing back to the tried and true old version - and just letting us EDIT there?? Please?
If not … well (grumble, groan, sigh) .. could you at least fix up these other faults mentioned above here then & enable us to edit our sposts here? Please?
(But really my first choice would be that you change things back to how it was - only with an editing capability, please!
Now that’d be just absolutely perfect!
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:47 am
Jeff Says on July 2nd, 2008 at 7:18 am :
Wrong.
I for one, do not.
All I want my computer to do is just bleedin’work!!!
Sdaly, I use microsoft … & internet explorer .. & have avery slow ,old machine. Saving up to buy a new one but that’s gosh-darned hard at present ..
—————
NB. Gee thanks Israel for causing the price of petrol to sky-rocket upwards again! NOT! How about you keep quiet and stop threatening to attack other nations like Iran and maybe all of us here in the Western world will be able to afford some petrol and luxeries like that & food again ..
Better yet, here’s a thought : Why don’t the Israelis abandon the South West Asian region and evacuate your people from the Islamic world region where you will simply NEVER be welcome and move your people & nation out to the USA or Europe where you would be safe and welcome! Now there’s a bit of lateral thinking that would help the whole planet!
(Iran or Syria or somebody there will inevitably gets nukes at some stage Isreal already has nuke sand other WMDs of its own. But using them -everybody loses. Personally, I’d rather not see an armageddon-type scenario result - why not make things win-win and have the AIPAC lobhy just buy New York & its surrounds and set up “Israel” there?
That way, they get their Jewish state made nice and safe and with good neighbours. The Palestineans and Muslims get their land back. Plus the world sees perhaps the worst conflict end helping salve Western-Islamci world relations. It even ends or at least dramatically diminishes terrorism since that’s mostly driven by the Isreali &US occupations too …
That sure seems the best way out to me. Why not have everyone push for that solution? Move Israel I say : Move it from Palestine to either America or Germany!
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:58 am
Oh yes, I know there’s that silly traditional mumbo-jumbo about the then tentribes of wanderers being the “Chosen people” (cough, BS, cough, cough!) with somebody elses land being promised to them by their stone age tribal god … but well, come on, the jewish peopel have been Europeans in geographical residence and culture since about 70 AD.
The land of Palestine does actually belong to the Palestineans and if we’d set aside the guilt over the Shoah for a second we’d see that and accept their right totheir own country in a nano-second!
(Shoah = the Nazi Holocaust - which incidentally was not just about the Jews and nor, in reality, was it the worst holocaust ever - Stalin and Mao killed far more and the Europeans killed most during colonialism when it comes to these sort of ugly atrocities ..)
Like I said, why not have a win-win scenario and shift Israel away from where it doesn’t belong, back somewhere where it does?
July 3rd, 2008 at 7:06 am
Not meaning to hijack the thread or anything …
Sorry if it seems that way.
I just really think this idea is worth considering & want to get it out there.
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:22 am
Phil, congratulations on your move. I see that you mention font and layout, and I wish to let you know the first things I noticed, which you may consider when “tweaking”: 1. The left margin is so narrow, that the letters actually touch the border of the window (or the screen, if maximized). I have seen this with 3 browsers in XP (IE, Firefox, Opera). 2. The font is, I believe, harder to read than the one at your other host.
Anyway, the content is what matters, so I will stay.
Keep up.
Guillermo
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:32 pm
First of all… Congrats!!!
Second of all… I love that it is on discovermagazine.com. I read all your stuff and then I can read a bunch of other cool stuff!! I am not sure why I never went to discovermagazine.com before, I love the magazine… Two great things on one site!!! (and many more as I will Discover)
July 4th, 2008 at 9:22 am
It’s not bad - glad you’re happy! I would agree with JanieBelle about missing the non-generic spacey title at the top. There is something cold about this one. Also, the font being smaller and the style of font in the comment section is not as comfortable on the eyes.
As far as the blogroll, it was what led me to those sites, and say, with Jennifer’s Twisted Physics site, she has a very large science-related blogroll. Since it wasn’t a large blogroll I took it to mean ‘highly recommended’, and in fact each was a different style of communicating science or skepticism.
July 11th, 2008 at 8:37 am
A lot of positive comments!
good luck
July 12th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Hi,
On the old blog, external links opened in new tabs/windows, now they don’t. If you can still do it, I liked the old way better.
Congrats on the move,
Malcolm