ScienceBlogs was handed over to National Geographic long ago. Behind the scenes, work has progressed to migrate the site from Moveable Type to Wordpress and put NG's yellow-margins branding onto everything. And now the switch-over is imminent. Late May maybe? The new site is already up on an interim URL. I am now copying the past few weeks' entries after the migration team copied the database for automatic transferral. Everything looks good except that I haven't figured out the Scandinavian diacritic characters yet. Any shakiness and flakiness in the near future will no doubt be due to the move. But I feel we're in good professional hands. One thing the move will mean for the Dear Reader is that you will have the opportunity to log in and use a picture by-line when commenting, effectively becoming more of a steady community member. Onward to glory!
Update 16 May: Good news. Crowd Favourite have solved the Scandy / German / French characters problem and promise to shrink the period for which we need to hand-copy entries from weeks to days.
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I don't know. I'm rather annoyed. For some reason, the powers that be claim they can't migrate any posts over since April 23, which strikes me as ridiculous. We're also going to loose about a month's worth of comments (April 23 until whenever the powers that be decide to flip the switch in a couple of weeks).
I have better things to do with my time than to manually transfer the last couple of weeks worth of posts and then to double post everything from now until the switch.
You're right, we would have to double-post a whole month. And lose 1/12 of this year's comments.
Crappy technological solution.
But on the positive side, the world is not going to end :-)
"Painted ancient Maya numbers reflect calendar reaching well beyond 2012 (w/ Video)" http://phys.org/news/2012-05-ancient-maya-calendar.html
*sings* Always look on the bright side of life...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlBiLNN1NhQ
I haven't figured out the Scandinavian diacritic characters yet
Do the HTML entities for these characters (ä, etc.) not work? That's how I have been getting accented West European characters to appear in my comments when needed. Greek letters have worked the same way.
Eric, yes, the HTML versions work. But I need to convert the entire Aard archive that currently has erroneous character strings instead of the diacritics in the upcoming Wordpress version.
"One thing the move will mean for the Dear Reader is that you will have the opportunity to log in and use a picture "
I see no benefit in that. Maybe I lack some egoism or something.
"But I need to convert the entire Aard archive that currently has erroneous character strings "
The strings are not erroneous. If the old system could handle them, the migration to the new system can handle them - or it has a serious bug. And the bug is not in the source code. It is in the specs, i.e. it is a management decision. Just like deciding that a few weeks worth of entries and comments won't be automatically migrated, because it would take severel seconds of precious CPU time.
A hint to the powers that be: all text databases should use Unicode, for the benefit of future generations. Sticking to US ASCII or its bastard sons (e.g. Windows-1252 or &something) is a form of cultural racism.