Category: Maintenance

August 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 […]

The 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 […]

There’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 […]

I’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 […]

There’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 […]

For 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, […]

I 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 […]

Two 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. […]

There 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 […]

A 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 […]