I spotted this in the RSS feed, came here and wondered where it was! Any reason not to put it up front?

We certainly get enough of them, that’s for sure.

The links in the article queue emails look like they’re not getting some variables translated. Here’s an example of what I get in my mailbox:

http://www.sciscoop.com/user/%%NICKNAME%%/prefs/Interface

I presume that %%NICKNAME%% should have translated to pythor for me. The link certainly doesn’t work the way it is.

Sorry about that. The template was expecting one thing, the code was providing another…

Let me know if you see any other template keys that didn’t get replaced.

You mean the soapbox? Never thought of putting it upfront…is that something that used to happen as a matter of course?

db

n/t

I just “claimed” SciScoop on Technorati and was pleased to see that it ranks #602! Not sure out of how many, but it must be millions…

If everyon who hasn’t yet added the sciscoop tag to their technorati blogroll were to do so, that might push us up further still, and hopefully with more exposure would come more readers and so more people interested in posting to the site…

If you’re not already registered with Technorati please considering signing up and then click this link to add SciScoop to your favourites

Add SciScoop to my Technorati Favourites. If you’re of a mind to, feel free to add my personal site Sciencebase.com to your faves too, click here.

Thanks

db

I’ve added for of the most popular social bookmarking links to the story template. Please be liberal with your linking and tagging, it really could help bring SciScoop more recognition.

I got rid of those old-style chiclet button things and added a new slew of mini-icons to allow visitors to add sciscoop.com to their social bookmarks etc.

If you’re bookmarking favourite is missing please let me know and I’ll add it.

If these are a waste of space too, also please let me know.

Maybe it’s time to do a membership survey to see how many of us are spambots!

I’d like to implement a captcha box to block these painsinthearse but I haven’t the programming skills to do so and the scoophost guys say it wouldn’t be simple to do either. How does fellow scoop site slashdot get around the issue? Maybe I’ll give them a call and try to find out.

Meanwhile, we only need another two spammers to sign up and sciscoop membership will be 2000!

There we go! Sciscoop reaches 2000 members…pity one of the two new members since yesterday was a spambot, but at least the other one was legit…

We now have just over 2000 members, have published more than 2500 stories and are still seeing several thousand individual visitors across the site each day! If only we could find a way to persuade the passing trade to put their stamp on the site with comments and stories.

it uses a different program, one that doesn’t have community voting.

It uses slashcode, which is not Scoop.

Slashdot gets rid of spam submissions because the editors approve all submissions. They get rid of spam comments through a moderation system. To get moderator points, you have to be active in the community, and they have a large number of members who take their moderation privileges seriously.

thanks for that

db

We’re now piping the SciScoop newsfeed via Feedburner. You don’t need to change or do anything if you’re already subscribed. In fact, the new system simply means readers who click the RSS button in the menu get to see a nice formated version of the feed whatever their browser settings (or if they’ve got feeds set to fire up their aggregator that should work just the same) and can subscribe much more easily than before.

With the Feedburner feed, visitors can quickly and easily add the SciScoop feed to their Google reader page, My Yahoo, Netvibes, Pluck, Bloglines, Newsgator, Rojo, My AOL, Pageflakes, and in fact any other newsreader enabled webpage or system they like.

The stats take a few days to accumulate as news readers come online and poll the feed. I’ll post a Feedburner button to show the number of active subscribers once it’s stabilised.

Please let me know if there are any problems.

SciScoop is now hovering around the 550 newsfeed subscriber mark for users grabbing it via the Feedburner link (as opposed to members who can opt in for the newsfeed using their settings page). I’d hoped that subscriptions would have risen faster from an almost standing start at 420. If you haven’t added the RSS to your My Yahoo! page, Google Reader, Bloglines, or your news aggregator, why not give it a go. I think we’re set up for full text feed so you get all the latest from SciScoop without even having to visit the site!

Let’s see if we can get it to 1000 by new year 2007!

I’m going to tweak a few things on the SciScoop site to try and simplify the user experience. I’ve already disabled comment controls as I know for a fact their presence has put a few people off commenting. Other things will include a reduction in that overblown menu…

What are comment controls, the rating system?

Previously, there was a bar above the “post a comment” link that allowed users to change the way a comment thread was displayed based on the rank of the comments based on user mojo. But seeing as most posts get only one or two comments at most these days it was simply a distraction, so I removed it

A new breed of comment spammer is emerging. Not only are blogs and fora seeing manual comment spammers posting their myriad links for keep it up pills and casinos, but they’re now embedding snippets of text pertinent to the post in question. I assume these are simply being autoscraped from sites like Wikipedia and Amazon as we saw with the half dozen commentspams from user “Evans” yesterday (all deleted Evans, thanks). Either way, they’re easily spotted by our CrapGateTM system and deleted within seconds of their appearance.

db

I’ve updated the SciScoop homepage to trap a single feed item above regular posted stories. This will include all the extras from the site in question facilitated by Feedburner. It’s not exactly fireworks, but a little July 4 celebration nevertheless.

db

Thanks to Chad for pointing out a problem with the SciScoop feed, I’d been messing around with the script that displayed Sciencebase items somewhere on the site and that coupled with a few tweaks at Feedburner meant the feed was resolving to that of Sciencebase. It’s all better now. Feed links should all resolve to SciScoop feed.

db

SciScoop has launched a new Art Meets Science section, following a suggestion from artist Randall Klopping. The first test post is currently in moderation. Take a look and let us know what you think. I hope this new section will reinvigorate SciScoop and invite any and all readers new and old to submit their science-inspired art and artistic images from science.