Skeptical Science Housekeeping: flags, printable versions, icons and links... lots of links
Posted on 22 April 2010 by John Cook
The business of upgrading and developing Skeptical Science continues slowly but surely. The most significant update is a new page listing the latest climate articles. This displays all the most recent links from the Global Warming Links directory. The page lets you customise which links to view. You can view just the last week, month or year (I'll extend this later to include all time and paginate the results). You can narrow it to either skeptic or pro-AGW links. And what I find most useful - you can view only certain types of links such as mainstream media or peer-reviewed. So this allows you to check out all the skeptic peer-reviewed papers published in the last month. Or if you want to keep up with current views, check out the skeptic articles published in mainstream media over the last week.
Of course, the list isn't as comprehensive as I would like. I've been setting aside regular time to add new peer-reviewed papers but there is only so many hours in a day. So please feel free to submit any climate links you happen to come by - especially mainstream media articles and peer-reviewed papers. Note with the peer-reviewed papers that you enter the correct year of publication. Plus I've begun adopting a convention with all paper titles that I add (Author Year) at the end of the title - this isn't necessary but offers useful context when perusing paper titles. The peer-review database is growing steadily.
Most of you have probably noticed a long line of flags now adorning the top of the website header. This was an excellent suggestion from Richard Hawkins who thought all the translations should be more prominent and accessible. Considering the huge efforts by all the volunteers who are translating the skeptic arguments into other languages, I heartily agree.
I've reshuffled the left margin, compressing all the various social media buttons and feeds into a single line of icons (another worthy design suggestion from Richard Hawkins). The iPhone app/donation button are a little unbalanced but this will balance out better once the Android app is released (which apparently is not too far away - more on this soon).
Lastly, I've added a printable version of the entire list of skeptic arguments and the short rebuttals (thanks to Anna Haynes for the suggestion). Something useful to carry around in your pocket if you don't have an iPhone :-)
If anyone misses the Skeptic of the Week feature, I can easily add that back in - I just commented out the code.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/comments.xml
That would be me :-) Every little bit of Skeptical Science was built from the ground up - no pre-packaged blog scripts at all - so inevitably it's a little unpolished. With only so many hours in the day, I tend to take a 'bare minimum policy' - do whatever programming is required to get the job done. As Doug Bostrom said when he helped me improve the website's security, my code is 'idiosyncratic'.
I'll look further into escaping non-XML compliant characters.