Skeptical Science housekeeping: Woody Guthrie award, bug-fixes, Facebook and donations
The Woody Guthrie Award for a Thinking Blogger is an honour passed from blog to blog where each blogger subsequently gets to choose the next recipient. Dan Satterfield from Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal was the last recipient of the Woody Guthrie Award. He received the award from Greenfyre. I wonder if anyone has documented the history of the award, like tracing the path of the Holy Grail. Could be a good Dan Brown novel. But I digress. Dan Satterfield has awarded the Woody Guthrie award to Skeptical Science. Many thanks to Dan for the honour. I guess I'll savour the award for a while then decide who to pass it onto next. Hmm, one blog does jump to mind but will mull it over for a few weeks...
A quick bug-fix report. For a while, people have been telling me the unsubscribe link from emailed blog posts wasn't working. This perplexed me as the link worked fine for me until I realised it only worked if you were logged in (which I always was). Once the light dawned, I fixed the unsubscribe link. So this can be the last Skeptical Science post you receive by email if you click the unsubscribe link at the top or bottom of the email (but don't).
With much appreciated help from Trevor Murdock, we've set up a Skeptical Science Facebook page. All this newfangled social media is making my head spin but well, gotta keep up with you young whippersnappers.
Up till now, there's been printable versions of the skeptic arguments but not of blog posts. I've now added a Printable Version link at the bottom of each blog post as well as a Link To This Page link. Thanks to Gerry who asked for this feature. I notice many blogs have the whole array of "Share this" icons at the bottom of their blog posts linking to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. If this is something people will use, I'll look into adding these also.
A new translation has been added: Portugese. There have also been attempts at translations into Japanese and Polish but we're having problems displaying some of the characters. If there are any HTML gurus cluey on displaying all manner of non-English characters that might have an idea on how to resolve this, it would be great if you could contact me.
Lastly, I've put this off for as long as possible. The time demands of Skeptical Science have grown steadily over time - posting, researching peer-reviewed papers, responding to comments, developing the website, the constant process of improving the content in the skeptic arguments (I love to tinker) and many, many emails to reply to. The release of the iPhone app kicked things into overdrive which is a good problem to have but nevertheless, still a problem. The beauty of self-employment is the flexibility to work on climate whenever I want. The curse of self-employment is when I don't work on the day-job, I don't get paid. So to keep Skeptical Science sustainable, I'm finally having to ask for donations. Any amount is appreciated - just click the Paypal button in the left margin. Thanks for your support :-)
Posted by John Cook on Sunday, 28 February, 2010
