Sunday, December 27, 2009

New comment format   posted by Razib @ 12/27/2009 03:34:00 PM
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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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Monday, December 14, 2009

Comments   posted by Razib @ 12/14/2009 11:22:00 AM
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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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Monday, December 07, 2009

Technical difficulties   posted by Razib @ 12/07/2009 10:40:00 AM
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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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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Virus problems with gnxp?   posted by Razib @ 12/26/2007 12:06:00 PM
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Received this email:
It appears your website has been compromised. When visiting https://gnxp.com (as opposed to regular http) Firefox prompted me with a message that the security certificate for snakeoil.dom has expired. After some googling I found out it is likely an authentication certificate for a virus.

http://journals.aol.com/cutefacedblonde/snakeoil.dom--snakeoil.com/


I didn't have the same problem. I'm in a hurry, but I assume this is a client side issue? There isn't an SSL certificate for this website.

Update: See this.

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Monday, August 06, 2007

Template changes   posted by Razib @ 8/06/2007 02:47:00 PM
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Some of you may have noticed that I've been tweaking with the template a bit. The goal is to make the site look less ghetto and maximize ease of use for regulars and new readers. Using the site for the past day I have noticed that I had been using the big ScienceBlogs image to check my other weblog, so I added a small link to the right with a link to the other Gene Expression. The main other difference is that I added links to the various categories ("labels") that we've been using for a while now. It's messy as there are inconsistencies with spelling and casing, and I'll fix that later, but if you are interested in category views, well, they're back after a 3 year hiatus (I deleted the MT templates for categories years ago during one of the "server over usage" crises we used to have back when we weren't being hosted by Rick & Liz. I never reinstalled them because it didn't look like it was easy and I didn't want to spend the time on that, but people have long wanted to have category archives).

Update: You can now send an email immediately to the author of any post by simply clicking their name (see above to the right of the post). There has been a contact link to the right for a while, but I just figured this would be easier for a lot of people, especially if (for example) the author of a study critiqued found a post via google and wanted to respond directly instead of in comments (which would likely be long dead).

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Saturday, May 19, 2007

Latency in Haloscan   posted by Razib @ 5/19/2007 09:53:00 AM
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Just an FYI, Haloscan seems to be forcing a delay between posting a comment into their database and displaying it on the message board. Please wait a few minutes before posting again! Your comment might show up.

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Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Admin, etc.   posted by Razib @ 2/20/2007 10:29:00 PM
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I've received a half dozen complaints about the slowness of the site due to the technorati widget, so I've removed it for now. I see an improvement in load time. Yay or nay?

Also, to the right you should see an RSS feed logo from feedburner. I've always had a feed, with a small link provided, but I figured that regular readers should really be encouraged to use this. Of course, the RSS won't tell you which comment threads are hopping, but in terms of maximizing time utilization I think it's a good move. You can always bookmark the Haloscan thread of interest (speaking of which, anyone know a better offsite comment service? I don't like onsite comments because they are liable to take a site down because of repeated hits).

Finally, for those of you down with RSS, I highly recommend adding a few Google News queries to your feeds. For instance, I have genetics & evolution always updating in Google Reader (which has some downsides, but I like the total integration with my google home page). You can see the RSS links to the bottom left. The PLOS network also has an excellent set of feeds (page down) so you don't need to keep checking on their site for new articles (other journals have them too, but I don't find them as user friendly or value added).

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