Some minor but nice improvements to the look and feel of the blog today. We have a shiny new banner, so that it’s easy to tell what blog you are actually reading. And if you find to your horror that you’ve been reading Cosmic Variance when you meant to be reading Not Exactly Rocket Science, there’s a helpful widget in the right column that can take you directly to any of the other Discover blogs. Thanks to the crack team at Discover for the upgrades.
I’ve also added a widget that keeps you updated on our Twitter feeds. Right now that means mine and Daniel’s, as well as the Cosmic Variance feed (mostly, but not exclusively, links to each new blog post), and one I set up for From Eternity to Here. But who knows what the exciting future may bring? Actually I worry a bit that the blog has become less likely since I started with Twitter, since one-liner-type links to interesting things generally go there rather than here. Leaving all the more substantial stuff for the blog, which is great, but there’s only so much time for substantial stuff, so the posting frequency has gone down. Or maybe I just worry too much.
In older but no less fascinating news, we have a Facebook fan page. And — it’s down a bit, so you may have missed it — the long-lamented “recent comments” widget has reappeared.
Last summer we passed our fifth year of blogging at Cosmic Variance, and didn’t even really notice. Here’s to many more years!
It’s also added a HUGE amount of time to the load speed of each page 🙁
What has, the Twitter feed? It seems fine to me. But if others confirm, I’ll just remove it.
Load time seems fine by me. Moving back a few post, avg. load time ~2-5 s… Could just be the first time the widget loads.
anyway, 2 thumbs up on the new design and twitter feed. 🙂
Could just be the university connection today, but I’m having 25 to 30 second page loads; when it doesn’t just give up and quit [“The server at ~ is taking too long to respond”]. Everything else on the web I’ve been to loads up in a couple of seconds. It’s not just this blog, but all the Discover blogs I’ve tried to access (BasAstro, Sci not Fiction, etc)
I’m having the same problem with page loads on both this and Bad Astronomy today.
Page loading problem seems to be intermittent issues with the “digg” button; our crack team of technological wizards is all over it.
Yeah, sorry about that, folks–we were having some, uh, issues yesterday. Working much better for me today. Can always email webmaster@discovermagazine.com if there are any technical problems with the site.