Announcing the new and improved Atomic Insights
The Atomic Insights Blog has been published here on Blogger since March of 2005. It has been a great host at a terrific price. Who can beat free?
However, there are some limitations to the format and the expandability. Some of my friends have also teased me about having an outdated, old fashioned looking lay out. One of them took it upon himself to design a new site and show me what it would look like if I moved my blog to a different platform with a much more creatively supported blog engine – like WordPress.
The raw material for that site update was the “classic” Atomic Insights web site, the one that sort of looked like a blog created before the word was invented. Actually, for the web historians in the audience, Atomic Insights was more like an e-zine or a webzine – it started life as a paper newsletter in April of 1995. Another friend who called me old fashioned back then took on the task of converting it to HTML and showing me how to publish it on the web. For its first few years of existence, Atomic Insights lived in a directory on a server at the University of Wisconsin. (As you can tell, I am kind of a cheapskate who is willing to use free services if available.)
Anyway, this message is a long-winded way of saying that there is a new Atomic Insights that will be the new place to read updated content and engage in intelligent discussions about energy from an atomic point of view. For the time being, the plan is to leave this Blogger site in place and to finish up the conversations that are still going on.
Once we have worked out all of the kinks associated with starting up a new platform and converting a moderate number of existing files, we will open up comments at the new site. Then we hope to migrate the articles posted here to be archived there. However, there are some technical issues that might prevent that from being a smooth process. I am still a conservative, risk averse nuke at heart, so we are taking a tight pants, belt and suspenders approach and trying to prevent any breakage for all of the links that are involved.
Not that I am complaining, but the task of convincing more than 60,000 visitors to change their bookmarks from http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com to https://atomicinsights.com may take a few reminders. Notifying and modifying the hundreds of sites that provide links here might be an even longer process. For any webmasters in the crowd, if you have links to individual posts, please do not worry or modify them; they will continue to work. The biggest challenge of all will be to get the crawlers to notice the new site and the PageRank algorithm to begin giving the new site the same kind of web cred that this blog has developed.
If you try out the new site and like the way it looks and works, you can get in touch with Jason, the creative and technical force behind the conversion project http://www.facebook.com/correiaj.
The new design looks nice :). I hope the transition goes smoothly for you.
One question I had – is there an updated RSS feed? The main link on https://atomicinsights.com/ points to an incorrect link of http://www.yoursite.com/feed. Just as a test, I tried https://atomicinsights.com/feed, and it looks right, but I wanted to make sure that is what I should be using.
Thanks!
The new feed link should be coming very soon.
The new feed link is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AtomicInsights/
Looks great. As a WordPress user myself, I like the theme and the magazine layout.
One recommendation. You might want to include a plug-in for threaded comments (if this is going to become the new blog site). It’s one of the things that I like best about js-kit system (you can build a conversation around a single post, and don’t have to review an endless list of disjointed comments, each trying to communicate with each other, trailing off after each post).
Threaded comments are now native to WordPress.
As for what and how the comments will operate on the new site, that’s a secret 🙂
I second the recommendation for threaded comments.
Other suggestions:
Install a feature to preview comments before posting them. This is one area in which the comments engine in blogger is vastly superior to js-kit.
Allow the “blockquote” tag. I’m tired of improvising my own way to distinguish long blocks of text that were written by someone else.
Please install the wp-latex or MathJax plugins for WordPress. English is only my second language. Mathematics is my first, preferred means of communication.
I think you should take a look at those templates on blogger. There are a lot cool features that are real easy to implement – just point and click. You can create extra pages real easy, install wigits and news feeds, random quotes generators, slide shows….. there’s an amazing array of stuff you can do within blogger. Some of the best blogs out there use blogger.
You can use your masthead on their templates too.
And the BIGGEST reason to stick with blogger, you won’t lose subscribers!
http://www.blogger.com/template-editor.g?blogID=4010125631613458355
You should be able to move your feed from blogger to WP self-hosted feed without loss of subscribers:
http://www.bloggermint.com/2010/11/transfer-blogger-feed-to-wordpress/
There are many good reasons to make the move: control over every aspect of your site, greater publishing controls (and rankings with goggle), database management tools, control over feeds, huge group of plug-ins (that enhance user experience), and more.
With the redirects that we will be putting in place, readers from the atom feed, hotlinks, or bookmarks should not be left looking to find the new material.
I’m aware of the new blogger plans but the things we’re doing with WP are even better.
Rod,
Just curious, but couldn’t you just put an entry in that is a simple link to point to the new site, and say, ‘go here’ by clicking on it?
Or do they sort of frown on this sort of thing?
Ed
Ed, when we have the redirect in place that will not be necessary. Think of this as a showcase event for now.
Good choice Rod. Whether we like it or not, presentation conveys a lot to the end user and can impact how information is received. Like the look of the new site.
I see it has a Search feature – Thank you! I was trying to find your blog on NG Fracking in PA and gave up. Had to use Google to find it (and dig through the hay to find the needle)!
Lookin’ good guys!! I am excited for the new site; I’m sure that everyone will be really pleased with it when it makes the transition!
Looks good!! Teamwork is paying off!!
I just hope the new format will allow you to moderate comments when necessary.