A short service announcement

December 4, 2012 § 1 Comment

While we have about 700 blogs in our database, we are happy that we get a few more every week! But if you have submitted a blog recently, you might be wondering why your submission didn’t show up yet. Let me try to convince you not to give up hope and to stick around for what is about to happen with mathblogging.org. (If you only have 2 more seconds to read this post, jump to the end now.)

One reason for delays we had to give repeatedly in the past was that we are only three volunteers, and our jobs sometimes too often keep us from doing the maintenance that the website and database need. We want to resolve this for good, and we think we have found just the way that will additionally improve what mathblogging.org has to offer.

When we started the website, we didn’t have a clear idea of what it should become; what we thought of can maybe be described as a phone-book for mathematical blogs. Moving forward, it became clear that just listing blogs alphabetically would not provide the service we wanted, so we started experimenting with the representation of the data we collect from the RSS-feeds of the blogs. But, not surprisingly, all our naive efforts in this direction (while well received) did not get half as much positive feedback as the editorial work that went into the weekly picks on this blog and the “hourly picks” on twitter.

Incidentally, the awesome people over at scienceblogging.org (now ScienceSeeker.org) went into a similar direction in rewriting their website from a simple list of blogs to a more dynamic collection with a lot of editorial aspects. And awesome as they are, they publish their SubjectSeeker-code under an open source license!

So we will move away from writing the code for mathblogging.org ourselves, and focus more on editorial challenges. This will also mean that we can have more editors!

At the moment we are busy setting up the new site, and making sure that as much of the old data as possible is transferred. If you are itching to find out what the new website will look and feel like, you can now take a look at the public beta-version! Be sure to let us know what you think about it.

On the downside, this unfortunately also means that right now we have even less time for maintenance of the current site.

We will restrain from giving any precise prediction as to when the new site goes officially up; this post is to let you know that we are still here, that mathblogging.org is not going to be abandoned, and to allow you a sneak-peak at the new design.

tl;dr: New website is coming, even if it looks like nothing is happening right now.

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