BCBlog

Today we launched a brand new section at Blogcritics.org: Sci/Tech!

That’s short for “Science/Technology,” and it’s the new home of all, um, science- and technology-related articles. We’ve got a few folks already who have been contributing excellent science material all along (Hi, Bennett!), and other who’ve been champing at the bit, so I expect to see plenty of increased Sci/Tech material over the coming weeks. Especially as people report in on their Christmas presents!

Because of the new section, quite a few category names have changed. No big deal, not even worth mentioning — unless you subscribe to the RSS feed for any of them! Fortunately, I’ve been able to handle the updates using automatic redirects, so you shouldn’t have to do anything at all. You *might* get double-articles today (or the next time you refresh), and I’m sorry about that, but that should be the extent of your worries.

All of the Sci/Tech and Culture feeds are now being routed through Pheedo, by the way, along with Books, Sports, Politics, and Gaming categories, as well as the main feed and all section and type feeds. Music and TV/Film category feeds are still to come, as I get to them. There may be some wrinkles with all of that, but Pheedo has been very eager to work these things out and solve any problems that come up, so that’s good.

By the way, it’s really nice to see Eric Berlin posting here regularly. That makes this blog even more worth visiting, even when I go a week without posting!

Sometimes the little things in life are what matter. Sometimes not. You can decide for yourself the category into which tonight’s accomplishments fall.

• I’ve been meaning to update the RSS Feed Listing for quite some time, and I finally did so.
• And oh yeah, all RSS feeds are now full-content feeds; no more excerpts!
• I’ll warn you now: expect ads in the RSS feeds. Soon. Every retrieval of any feed costs us cash money, so we’ve got to do something! They’ll be good ads. From Pheedo.
• Speaking of RSS feeds, did you know that there are feeds for the different Article Types on the site? Most people didn’t, though they’ve existed for a while. In addition to listing them all on the RSS Feed Listing page linked above, the appropriate Type feed is also linked in the RSS section of the Article Info box on each article page.
• The RSS pop-up which I added a couple of weeks ago had problems. Still does, actually, but I’ve eliminated most of them. By drastically chopping down the number of aggregators supported, I eliminated all dead and broken links; only web-based aggregators remain. The z-index setting is still a little odd, because DIVs that appear later in the code appear to have a higher z-index even though it is set artificially high, but I did fix the positioning bug that was causing most of the problems with that. I re-ordered the remain aggregators to promote our two favorites, too: My Yahoo! and Bloglines.
• Not everything I did tonight was RSS-related. For example, I changed the titles of 541 book reviews to bring them in line with the other sections (”Book Review:” instead of “Review:”). ‘Twas easier to do it semi-automagically than for editors to chase them all down, obviously.
• There were a couple of bugs chased down and squashed, several phone calls made, and plenty of emails read. Somewhere during the course of the evening I decided to start a new Feature Column, as well. Why do I do that? Why?

In any case, it’s approaching 1am where I live, and my wife went to bed hours ago, so I think I’ll do the same. We won’t talk about the todo item I didn’t finish, or the ones I didn’t get to, m’kay?