Comments on: Bloggy B. Blog McBlog

By: Get out the vote! | Cosmic Variance

Get out the vote! | Cosmic Variance — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 15:59:46 +0000

[...] A final way to have your own bit of vox populi be heard is to visit Wampum and vote for the Koufax awards (previously mentioned here). You’ll have to keep checking in, as posts where you can actually vote are gradually being assembled; so far we’ve seen [...]

By: erc

erc — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 15:07:58 +0000

Pharyngula has the option of reading only the science content on the blog. Maybe he could help implement Moshe’s suggestion.

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 01:28:18 +0000

Thanks, citrine. Fixed.

By: citrine615

citrine615 — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 01:07:01 +0000

Sean,

The links to Feministe and 3 Quarks Daily in your post #8
need to be switched.

By: Jeff Hodges

Jeff Hodges — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 12:18:53 +0000

Ok, added the “Click to read more” functionality. Too many blind alleys and too much time spent actually learning JavaScript. Annnd.. its 7:20am. Whew. Time for bed.

By: Jeff Hodges

Jeff Hodges — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:41:00 +0000

Sean, thanks for the proper link. Mixed States will be updated. Also, I cannot believe I didn’t think of the “click for more” idea. Jeez. I’ll start working on that one. The sorting code would be much more difficult. “click for more” is one of the easiest things to do, and can satisfy many of the readers requirements. Thanks!

By: Sean

Sean — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:14:08 +0000

Jeff, thanks for commenting (and I've fixed the URL for Mixed States). I do appreciate the greater convenience of a "planet" (although I didn't know they were called that), and I am a regular reader of Mixed States myself. Like you say, the biggest benefit is discovering things you might not otherwise find, which is something I was lamenting in the post itself. But still I miss the look and feel of truly well-designed individual sites, like Feministe or 3 Quarks Daily. (I note, of course, that neither of these is a physics blog.) By the way, I notice that you're using a truncated feed for Cosmic Variance. If you go to our Feedburner feed, you get the entire post. As to the physics-only idea: this does sound like work. Perhaps an alternative (which may be just as much work, I don't know) is to automatically display only the first paragraph of posts, and have the entire post appear if you click on the title. I don't mean that you go to another page, but that the post is hidden from view until you click; that's what we do with the blogrolls on our sidebar, or what Crescat Sententia does with its longer posts. Then people could zoom through the posts on topics they weren't interested in, only expanding the ones that caught their fancy.

By: Jeff Hodges

Jeff Hodges — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 05:21:05 +0000

Moshe, that is an intriguing idea. It would be quite a lot of work if I did it manually, and much less in the long term if we found a way to automate it. Before I dive in here, I should say I do not want Mixed States from displaying physics-only posts by default. As I stated in my introduction, I believe that Mixed States place the interplay of ideas beyond physics highly without removing physics as its core. However, your request strikes me strongly of a good idea. [edit, edit] I started writing another huge comment here, but decided against it (how much page space can a person take in a comment area that is not his own?) and instead posted my response on Something Similar. Would love to hear your comments on it.

By: Something Similar » Environmental Entanglement

Something Similar » Environmental Entanglement — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 05:19:57 +0000

[...] Good news all around. The most important one being that I have a box of oranges in my kitchen, a freshly peeled one in my lap and chocolate chip cookies in the oven. The next most important thing is that I find Mixed States linked by Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance (to which I have responded there) and Florine Meijer and that I’ve added the Biocurious group blog to Mixed States. [...]

By: Moshe

Moshe — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 03:04:14 +0000

Jeff, one small comment if I may. One thing that will make things more readable for me is some sorting by topic. What I mean is maybe trying to filter science content from more general content that is written on science blogs. It could be excellent for me to have for example list of physics (or biology or whatever) content appearing in blogs. I appreciate this is a lot of work, maybe with some cooperation from bloggers (who often have categories to their posts) this could be automated. Just a thought.