maintenance
drorzel | September 12, 2006I thought about posting something in advance of my annual moment of bloggy silence, to let people know what's up, as my traffic has increased by about an order of magnitude since the last time I did this. As the post is equal parts gesture of respect and protest against the use of the anniversary for grand political statements, though, I figured that posting "I am about to make a grand political statement" would be sort of self-defeating.
Anyway, my tradition of sorts is for the eleventh to be a media-free day, as far as that's practical. I don't read blogs, I don't respond to comments (a…
drorzel | September 1, 2006August was the highest-traffic month since the move, with Google Analytics recording 51,752 "Unique Visits" (whatever that means-- it's not 50,000 different people, I don't think). I'm sort of boggled by that number, which is about an order of magnitude higher than what I was seeing at the old site.
Somewhere in there, we also passed a quarter-million visits for the year, with the total as of this morning standing at 259,636 visits. Again, bogglement.
Anyway, I just wanted to note that, and say thanks for reading.
drorzel | August 27, 2006The Internet has been broken all afternoon at Chateau Steelypips, which is where there hasn't been anything new psoted, and why it's taken forever to approve a couple of comments that were held for moderation. Sorry about that.
(I'm typing this from my office on campus-- we turned Her Majesty's evening walk into an email-checking trip, with the added bonus being able to chase rabbits across the lawns on campus. Great fun was had by all, at least until I wiped out on the wet grass...)
As long as I'm posting to say why I haven't been posting, though, I might as well turn this into a technical…
drorzel | July 14, 2006There's been some behind-the-scenes tweaking of the ScienceBlogs framework, which has caused some problems with commenting on other blogs (along with some other embarassing glitches, involving posts being blocked by spam filters, and fun stuff like that). I haven't heard any complaints here, but it's entirely possible that people have had comments blocked, and just given up in despair.
So, if you've had comments blocked by the system, please drop me a line (orzelc at steelypips dot org) and let me know. And if you've noticed anything else wrong with the site, this would be a good place to…
drorzel | June 26, 2006I'm a very, very lazy blogger, and I'm particularly bad about updating my sidebar links. I finally got around to putting a few months' worth of new science-y blogs into the sidebar, though, so you might want to check them out, if you don't already read them:
Angry Physics "Presenting the "other" side of academic physics, where people backstab and give lousy talks. Where people are sometimes lazy or incompetent, and the best don't get the credit or the job. From the perspective of someone lucky enough to have landed a tenure-track professorship."
Backreaction A blog by a recently married high…
drorzel | June 22, 2006There's been some behind-the-scenes talk of the resurfacing of the annoying comment bug, which we had thought was fixed. I haven't noticed any problems myself, but I have noticed that the comment traffic is down a bit. I just attributed that to the fact that I haven't written much lately that was comment-worthy, but if there's a technical issue, I'd like to know.
If you've tried to post a comment recently (say, in the last two weeks), and been denied by the system, or had it vanish into the aether, please send me an email (orzelc at steelypips, which is an org not a com) and let me know when…
drorzel | May 5, 2006For the record: I am well aware that the tornado ad for the History Channel is incredibly annoying. You may or may not have noticed the additional charming feature that it breaks links that it passes over, at least in some browsers (Opera and Safari).
The dissatisfaction with the ad has been widespread and general, and has been communicated to the Powers That Be at Seed/ ScienceBlogs. We have been assured that there will not be any more ads that extend out over the text after this one finishes its run.
Many apologies for the inconvenience, and feel free to post any additional gripes you may…
drorzel | April 13, 2006I know the cookie bug is still afflicting some commenters-- the folks who make Movable Type are aware of the bug, and it will be fixed with the next release, whenever that is. You can get around the bug by either deleting cookies from scienceblogs.com, or by logging out from TypeKey, if you have a TypeKey identitiy, and have logged in.
Other than that, if there's anything I ought to be aware of-- bugs with the site, articles on other sites, nifty tricks involving magnets-- you know where the comments are.
UPDATE: the developer for ScienceBlogs recommends the "zap cookies" tool from this…
drorzel | March 29, 2006Two recurring issues regarding commenting:
1) There is some sort of a bug in the commenting software that occasionally causes comments to be rejected as lacking a valid email address, even when you have provided one. We think this is somehow related to the TypeKey registration required on some blogs, but it's hard to reproduce.
The solution to this problem appears to be deleting the cookies on your web browser, and re-posting. If this happens to you, please email me (address in the Contact tab above), and tell me when it happened, what browser and OS you were using, and what other…
drorzel | March 6, 2006There are active discussions among the ScienceBlogs bloggers and the folks at Seed about what features the main ScienceBlogs page ought to include. As you might expect, this has revolved around how best to draw traffic, both to the individual sites and in the aggregate.
It occurs to me that people reading the site might have some useful advice to offer. So, if you read the main page at all, and have suggestions about how to improve it, here's an open thread for you to leave a comment. I'll pass along any particularly good ideas to the ScienceBlogs web design team.
drorzel | February 21, 2006A couple of technical notes that may affect your reading and commenting experience:
1) The site developer has tweaked the RSS feeds to include links to the full post, and to the comments section. The comments links on some posts even appear to give a comment tally, which is pretty cool. Of course, implementing this may dump a huge number of old posts into your RSS feed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
2) The ScienceBlogs servers have been getting whacked by spam the last few days, which has led to some very sluggish loading, and some commenting problems. The development team (all one of him) is…
drorzel | February 19, 2006We're back after a fun weekend at Boskone-- my various panels went well, and I got to meet, talk to, and hang out with some terrifically interesting people. I think the "Weird Quantum Phenomena" talk went rather well (it was scheduled as a half-hour talk, but there was nothing else scheduled for the room, so it stretched out to an hour). I was surprised and pleased to see that so many people were interested in hearing about quantum mechanics at the very ragged end of a convention, and I hope they enjoyed hearing the talk as much as I enjoyed giving it.
Of course, it's impossible for…
drorzel | January 21, 2006I probably ought to say something about the New York Times piece on ScienceBlogs yesterday, except, well, there's not much to say. It's about two paragraphs in a media column, focussed entirely on the fact that they're going to try to sell ads on these sites (presumably, the big Seed ad on the right will become an ad for SigmaPlot, or something...). It doesn't really mention the content of the sites, except in passing.
(The article does continue the fine tradition of the New York Times writing articles about organizations I'm associated with without mentioning my name...)
I do want to…
drorzel | January 11, 2006Welcome to the new home of Uncertain Principles. If you've been reading the site over at Steelypips.org, that probably means something to you. If you're here for the first time, that might take a little explanation.
I started a book log in August of 2001, and quickly got drawn into reading a lot of general web logs. In late June 2002, I decided to start a general-interest weblog, which I've been updating regularly for the last three and a half years. Recently, the nice folks at Seed were kind enough to invite me to join their ScienceBlogs project, leading to the site you're now reading.
The…