I’ve decided to add a “user generated content” component to this weblog. The links submitted by users will now be at the top left. If you read this weblog, you know the stuff that readers (you) might find of interest. The main issue is getting to where you can submit the links.  First, initially I’ve limited the submission ability to those who have registered an account (that’s ~90 people right now). Because of the way the cookies work in WordPress you can see the user submit option only if you’re in the /wp directory, so http://www.gnxp.com/wp/. I’ve changed the link on the header so that it sends you to this directory. You’re also in the directory when viewing an individual post (I know that I can fix this by changing default WordPress settings, but it seems to break the permlinks to individual entries). I’m especially interested in papers, data sources, etc. I will be deleting crap or inappropriate content as well. The image to the right shows where the user submit form will be, underneath the authors list. But remember you’ll only see it if 1) you’re logged in, 2) you’re in /wp/.

Also, I’ve created a twitter account just for this weblog. My personal twitter account has only my content, but this new one will have content from everyone who posts on this weblog (nothing there currently since I set it up after the last post). Finally, I added a retweet widget. You can retweet with the current sharing widget at the bottom of posts, but  I figure this is more convenient and obvious for most people.

Note: Links are not going to be associated with a user, so they’re anonymous submissions. If particular users are purposely submitted crap I may have to revise that policy!

Addendum: I get a fair number of emails with links. I don’t have the time to respond to all the submissions, or even blog about them, so I figured this would be a useful outlet.

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Hope you’re having a good holiday weekend. I decided to reinstall WP because we’ve had several hacks compromise the system over the past few years, and I am beyond stop-gap solutions with the previous install. So I deleted it and installed a new copy of WP. I’ve tried to invest more time in security this time around in the beginning, but nothing’s perfect, so we’ll see.

Obviously I’m going to tweak this set up in the near future. Additionally due to a oversight of mine we don’t have the images for the earlier blog, though I did get all posts and comments. I likely have images on a back up on another computer, but I’m travelling now so that is not accessible. Also, I retrieved all users but they don’t have any privileges, so you may have to re-register (excepting front-page contributors, who I manually upgraded).

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If you have a blog, and you link to http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/, I would appreciate it if you switched to http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/. I know most people don’t use blogrolls much, but it matters for PageRank, and the archives have been copied so I’d rather have search engine traffic go to the active weblog ASAP. Thanks.

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Many of you already know this, but I’ve moved from ScienceBlogs to Discover Blogs. There isn’t much to say about this, I had a good run at ScienceBlogs, but Discover Blogs offers some new opportunities. All that matters for you is this, please update your bookmarks and/or RSS feeds:

Bookmarks: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp

RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpressionBlog

Also, remember my “total feed,” which covers all the blogs. I also added my occasional Comment is Free pieces to the feed: http://www.razib.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2. I also publish this to my twitter account, but there’s other stupid stuff there that you might want to avoid.

If you have a weblog that links to ScienceBlogs GNXP, I would appreciate you update the link for the same of PageRank.

Finally, I probably will be posting here far less for the indefinite future. While I was at ScienceBlogs there was a tacit understanding that I’d put the less science-oriented stuff here, the historical essays and what not. I don’t really have time to juggle too many blogs anymore, so I’m going to focus on Discover Blogs. In the future I have some ideas about making this domain more of a “user generated” website or an aggregator, but it is formative at this point. Since there are others who contribute to GNXP as a group weblog that feature will continue for the foreseeable future. But in two years I will have had this domain for a whole decade, and all endeavours go through life cycles.

P.S. Edmund Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science is also moving; kind of like Diasporic Chindia I guess….

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I guess I should mention this. A year and a half ago someone started a Gene Expression Facebook group. Nothing much is going on there right now, but I thought I’d point to it….

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For various reasons it was no longer feasible to run this website on Blogger. So I’ve switched over to WP. So please update your RSS feeds:

http://www.gnxp.com/wp/feed

Update: If you’re subscribed via the Feedburner feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpression, you don’t need to change anything. Just changed its feed address

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A lot of people (including paying readers! kidding!) are complaining about the new commenting format. I’ll be euphemistic and observe that it’s suboptimal. But I don’t have time to work on tweaking and beautifying it now, so please be patient. Over time it’ll move up the stack of my priorities, and hopefully your awesome contributions to the discussion will be facilitated by a more elegant and user-friendly commenting interface by the end of January.

Additionally, I am thinking that posting “admin” messages in this space is also suboptimal. It uses space which should be allocated to real posts about science and such. If you’re in the minority of readers who actually cares enough about your blog-reading experience to gripe in the comments, I invite you to subscribe to/follow my twitter feed, I’m gonna put “admin” related stuff there from now on. You can also send messages via twitter. Email is fine as always, but if you’re someone who I don’t recognize, there’s a non-trivial chance that you’ll stay at the bottom of the task stack and I’ll never get back to you. I have my twitter feed on my Google homepage, so I am more likely to see random direct messages (as I noted earlier, I get a non-trivial number of messages from PR people, so it isn’t unlikely that I’m forgetting emails in the “none of the above” folder).

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Haloscan is forcing an upgrade something called Echo. I am not inclined to switch comment systems since this has worked since 2004. So commenting may not work for a bit. But blogging will be light from me for a bit anyway.

Update: The new comment system is working, after a fashion. But I can’t install it fully because if I do it will interrupt their migration of Haloscan era comments into the new system, so I will leave it be until they give me the go ahead via email. Despite the fact that the comments box states “0″ comments, that is not necessarily so. The new comment system is rather flexible, and I’ve turned on the feature which allows for trusted commenters to go through the mod queue. That means that after an X number of comments over an Y period of time of approved comments you’re listed as trusted. This will probably be good since the active comment community here is relatively small. I’ll start doing other things when I think it won’t break everything.

P.S. There’s a 5,000 character limit on comments. If you regularly go over this, you need a blog.

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The old format is back. But without the customization. I’ll do that later when I have time….

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There were some difficulties with the site overnight. Probably best place to check for updates is my twitter feed, http://twitter.com/razibkhan. 99% of the stuff there are just re-posts of my blog content. If you don’t have my email address, you can also contact me http://razib.com. Additionally, I set up an aggregator weblog a few weeks ago, which is basically all the stuff from GNXP.COM, ScienceBlogs GNXP and my posts from Secular Right (just a feed of the “David Hume” author archives). Mostly useful for its RSS feed, since the links all point back to the individual blogs and comments are off.

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