Visiting the Nat Geo Overlords

Chris and I have met with our new National Geographic overlords here in DC, and we had a productive and interesting meeting. It was a great chance to put names to some faces and hear about where Nat Geo wants to take Scienceblogs. If any of the other sciblings can wrangle it I can highly recommend it. Also, to those who have commented on the migration to wordpress, the new look etc., they clearly are monitoring your opinions about the change and working to first make the system fully functional, then hopefully we can improve some stylistic elements of the site. In particular I think people miss the links to comments from the sidebars, number of comments visible from the main post, and the size of the lead-in. I also have to figure out why WP doesn't want to upload my custom banners. Oh well. It's a process.

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How about next time you see them you whack them with a large herring for not fixing the "Last 24 hrs" feature. For whatever reason it looks like postings have been rather sparse. Used to be twenty to fifty posts in a day. Now, five seems to be the best as good as it gets.

And the RSS feed is still borked. I've resubscribed, new titles now appear, but when you click on them "page not found" inevitably comes up. (and finding the articles through Last 24 hours of the specific sections is a nightmare).

By Ian Musgrave (not verified) on 07 Jun 2012 #permalink

Keep the comments coming. I'll forward these issues onto the ngs folks.

When are they going to number the comments, like on the previous incarnation?

Any chance they'll get rid of the worst of the intrusive ads? The ones that make this site look like Saturday night at a cheap rural midway?

I hope they are vigilant about keeping the tech up to date. Nothing looks worse than an obviously outdated website. The other thing is i hope they keep branding, censoring, and politics out of their purview. people need to be able to say whatever they want other than hate and obscenity. One little yellow box on the blog page is sufficient - we all know who that is. And monitoring posts because you are afraid it will piss off the advertisers is absolutely the worst kind of corporate BS. No excuses for any of that crap. That's why many of the best bloggers left before. Hope NatGeo got the memo on that.

How about a “reply” feature? It’s so cumbersome to copy and paste bits and pieces just to ask a question or add a bit to a comment that really strikes a note.