May 4, 2009

SciScoop Science Forum Relaunched

Posted in Science at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 6 Comments; add your comment

Sciscoop.com – the Science News Forum – was relaunched in on May 1. I gave the site a seriously long overdue makeover, re-themed the site, switched to new web hosting, and rebuilt everything from the ground up with the amazing technical assistance of my friend Ariel to make the most of advances in web content management systems.

The archive of well over 3000 articles contributed by more than 4300 members from first launch in November 2002 to April 2009 is now much better organized and accessible to keen researchers and casual browsers alike. I’ve also upgraded the search system, so that results are pooled from the archives of SciScoop and sibling site Sciencebase using Google site search, moreover, I’ve used a fantastic Wordpress plugin called Broken Link Checker to…you guessed it…check for broken links. It found a few dozen out of the several thousand links in all those posts and I’ve now corrected or removed them.

If you have any problems finding old features, spot any missing pages (Xenu has allowed me to uncover and fix most), or your news aggregator is no longer pinging the SciScoop Science newsfeed do get in touch via email or leave a comment below and I’ll try and fix any issues.

Meanwhile, if you were a SciScoop contributing member, your name is still on the list, just drop me a line and I’ll activate your account so you can post new stories…

You may recall that the original voting system blazed a trail that was followed by social media and bookmarking sites the world over way back in the early 2000s, but with the new hosting, I’m going for a more straightforward editorial approach to contributions. Traffic has increased by an order of magnitude already this week based on recent stats from the ver 1.0 site, so, SciScoop can hopefully offer you great exposure for your words. SciScoop is syndicated widely across the web, scraped by the Google news servers, and has close ties with many other popular science and technology sites.

SciScoop Science will continue to provide a great forum for a wide range of science-related topics from aerospace and astronomy to medicine and mathematics, from environment to technology and from cognitive science to controversial conjectures. This latter category provides an excellent place to hear about some of the more bizarre theories on climate change, cosmology, and medicine that tend not to find a forum elsewhere. Of course with comments enabled for all visitors everyone is free to pitch in with their opinions and skepticism as they see fit.