I would like to announce a new blog carnival related to bioinformatics/computational biology called Bio::Blogs (blame Stew for the tittle ;). I propose a monthly carnival accepting any submission of bio.comp related post. In good carnival tradition the editor will rotate to a new blog in each edition. To keep track of all of the editions I am working on a webpage for Bio::Blogs in wordpress. I will be kicking it off over at public rambling (shame on me :) so please send me your own bio.comp related posts to bioblogs(at)gmail(dot)com before the end of the month. Don't be shy, send links to your posts with tutorials, rants about bioinformatics papers, your mash up ideas, bird flu tracking systems, tips and tricks, etc. Also, if you are interested in hosting the next editions send me a mail and I will make a list.
All of this if of course open for discussion. For example suggestions for a symbol are welcomed :).
More on blog carnivals here and a list of science carnivals here.
bio::blogs
This is a great idea. I'd be happy to host at some stage - I'll email you soon.
I don't think the forums are working too well. At least one person has told me that they are not keen to post there because the post dates give the impression that the forums are dead. The posting rules, categories and so on are also not clear to casual visitors. And if you do go into the forums or promote to the front page - well it looks just like a normal blog post. I think we either need to be clearer about their purpose and make that clear to others, or just stick to blogs and moderate as need be.
I need to do something about
I need to do something about the visibility of the forum posts. When Alf originally suggested forums I thought this would be a good idea for people to post quick announcements without a) the post going via the submission queue b) clogging up the front page c) unattractive to spammers since posts don't appear directly on the front page.
So to subvert the 'please post announcements in the forums' mantra that I've been using lately, I'll post something on the front page pointing to this announcement :) This does need some traffic after all. Or maybe this policy is flawed...
Anyway, good start on the Bio::Blogs carnival (with a nod to Stew for the name)
promote to front page
Is there a 'promote to front page' option for forum posts? It would still be useful to get a forums feed as well.
I'm glad you mentioned the forum feed
It breaks the announcements in the forum rule, but what the hell. Since this is call out to the community, and not a conference/software announcement, it deserves attention.
I'm glad you mentioned the forum feed. I have create a composite feed of all the forums using the taxonomy module, you can test it out here. That link is actually an alias to this
The taxonomy feed system is interesting, however the combined feed channel metadata is not specific to the forum.
Some of the category URLs look weird (_0 appended), either I've managed to screw up the path aliases or the path alias module is buggy. Ditto the feed/feed on the end. Looks like I'll have a lot of cruft removal to do when I eventually get around to upgrading the site...