We’re pleased to announce that today see the introdution of some of your requested improvements to the Nature Network blogs.
Here’s a summary of those features and how to use them (much of the following applies to bloggers only, although the section on rich-text comments applies to all). There are still more improvements to come, including a stats plugin, but this is taking longer to implement that expected because it has a dependency on another system. We hope to have this with you within the next month and apologise for the continued delay – we know how important this is to many of you.
Custom banners
You can now personalise the rectangular space at the top of your blog, the bit where the blog name appears, by uploading an image. Here’s how to do it.
1. Choose an image. You’ll need something at fairly decent resolution and width, as it has to stretch a full screen width. Obviously, it should also be something that won’t look odd when cropped to fit the long, thin box at the top of your blog. Most importantly, make sure you have permission from whoever owns the copyright to the image or, better yet, use a photo you took yourself.
2. Go to your MT homepage. Please avoid using Internet Explorer. The plugin you’re going to use doesn’t work in IE for some reason, and it’s the only one available for MT4.
3. Go to Design → Custom Header and upload your image.
4. You should then see a pop-up window asking you to crop your image. Point and drag your mouse to define a stretched oblong across the image. Don’t worry about matching the dimensions to your blog’s header – it should automatically snap to that size. Once you’re happy, click ‘crop’. It’ll crop your image and take you back to the main banner page.
5. You now need to ‘Publish’ your site. Click the two circular arrows in the main menu and Publish All Files in the ensuing popup box.
6. Note, we are aware that this 3rd party plugin is a bit flaky (many thanks to all those who tested it and provided us with feedback), but it’s the only option available at the moment. We have contacted the original developer to provide an improved version based on your feedback, but rather than wait several more weeks to offer this to you, we wanted to let you get started with version 1.0. If you get stuck or want us to create your header for you, just send the image you want to use to Matt or Lou.
Favourite sites
1. You can now maintain a list of your favourite sites in your sidebar. These could be other NN blogs, blogs elsewhere or any other kind of web site.
2. Go to Manage → Link lists, and click ‘Create Link List’
3. Give your list a name. It could be simply ‘Blogroll’ or ‘Favourite sites’.
4. Click ‘create new link’ and fill in the details for each new site you want to link to.
5. When you’re done adding, click ‘save changes’
6. You can edit/delete/add links at any time.
7. When you’ve updated the list, you need to republish your templates. To do this, click the two circular arrows in the main menu and Publish All Files in the ensuing popup box.
Better commenting
You should now be able to browse between and comment on multiple blogs without having to sign in each time. In addition, you’ll notice a series of formatting options when commenting on a post. Simply highlight the text you want to make bold, italic, etc. and click the appropriate symbol. The image below should give you an idea…or click the comments link on this post to try it out.
Other Improvements
Finally, in response to all your feedback, the other things that we’ve changed are as follows:
-moved the date of a blog post to the top of the post
-added the time that you leave a comment on a post next to the date
-removed the “policy” tab from each blog
-changed the wording when commenting on a blog to “Please read our Community Guidelines before commenting.”
-added more useful social media “sharing” buttons on each blog post so that you can share or bookmark you favourite posts on twitter, Facebook, reddit etc.
-made cosmetic improvements to the RSS icons next to each post
Thank you for bearing with us while we responded to your problems – and do let us know how the new features work for you.
PS If you can’t see these features on your blog yet – don’t worry, they are coming! We have to manually publish each blog, which can take some time. We’re working through the archive as fast as we can.
Yay! I’m stuck at "choose an image", though! =) I’ll have a think.
I like it! Eva’s header is lovely.
It did take a crazy long time to republish everything. Phew! I might still change the banner, but just wanted to try it out. The one problem I had (aside from the whole site briefly crashing, whoops!) was that on my laptop the screen where I cropped the photo was by default of such a size that the "crop" and "cancel" buttons were in the photo area, so that I couldn’t click them without "cropping" the buttons. Then I found out I could make the whole box bigger, so the buttons didn’t overlap with the image anymore, and I was able to click them.
Yay! Well done, Eva – your header looks cool. It is a bit of a faff to get the tool to crop correctly but I think you’ve described really well the problem with the buttons. If anyone else can’t figure it out, don’t be afraid to ask for help!
These are all wonderful changes. I like for example the return of the time of comments.
Lou, you have mail.
and "Other Improvemetns" is about right.
Some good improvements in there, including banners, date stamps, post dates – many thanks!
But there are some residual/new bugs:
Plus, can I put in another appeal for a weekly update on what is happening behind the scenes? Please.
As for the consultation mentioned around the time of Dan Pollock’s post, how is that to be structured?
Ah – unexpected change of font in that list is another bug. Plus, you lose access to the formatting tools if you preview a comment.
Hope that’s enough feedback for now. 😉
Don’t know if its a bug, but on the blogs front page my latest post shows up as having NO comments on it… and there are actually four. A bit odd.
Only 11 minutes, Stephen? Mine took 22! I think it depends how much crap (photos etc.) you have in your blog archives, because it needs to rebuild the whole thing. I’m used to WordPress now, which doesn’t do this, but I got flashbacks to way back when I used Greymatter, which also needed rebuilding for every change, and that also always took so long.
And I also lost my orange button, even after refresh. I’m using the cgi-bin url that’s in my recent history, but if I clear my cache I won’t know how to update my blog anymore.
Where is Dan Pollock? He was at a conference 40 days ago, but that’s the last we saw of him
@Eva – The orange button seems to have gone from Safari but you can find it by refreshing in Google Chrome (very nice browser – if only it could display pdfs…)
Lee has 4 comments on his latest blog, but network.nature.com/blogs says there arnen’t any. So there’s obviously a bug there.
Also, has anyone fixed the bug that caused Martin Fenner’s pre-scheduled departure blog to go live 24 hours too early —> 404 message?
Just an update to my previous comment – using Lee’s blog as a guide and doing some maths, it looks as if the blogs page reflects new comments on his blog about 2 hr after posting. It used to be about 10 minutes, so perhaps someone could look into why the delay has been so aggravated after the update? And I think Austin’s blog still appears commentless besides the reality, so there might be a deeper problem. Has NN been giving multiple urls to blogs, as happened during my blog’s meltdown yesterday?
Catch it bin it kill it! #bugs
Quick update: we’re over half-way through republishing all of the blogs so most of you should be able to try out the new features now. We’ll continue with this process and all should be completed by the end of play tomorrow.
While this happens, we’ve temporarily slowed down the links between MT and NN i.e this is why you’re seeing a delay in the updates on the NN blogs homepage about numbers of comments on the blogs, for example. This will revert back to normal once we’ve republished everything.
As for the slowness of publishing your custom headers and blogrolls – this is partly just an MT issue because of needing to republish your whole archive. We can optimise the speed a bit more once we’ve got other things more stabilised, so bear with us.
As for logins, we’re looking into the orange button issue. You will still need to hit refresh to get the button to appear, but my understanding from your feedback is that it doesn’t work at all in Safari?
I will also endeavour to keep the updates more frequent now – including giving you an update on how we’ll be running the focus groups soon. I’m sure you can appreciate that it’s been a very busy time recently with lots of related projects on the go. I hope the rest of the year will show you some of the fruits of these.
For the record, email notifications of comments seem to be working again.
But still not for me – not since the switchover…
Stephen – we know that you’re still not receiving emails (along with several other people) and this is being looked at by IT so we’ll hopefully get to the bottom of it soon. We know that gmail/yahoo/hotmail addresses seem to work fine, so if you want to change the email that you’ve used in MT while you wait for us to sort things out, you will at least receive your notifications, and can then switch back to your original address later.
I’m not seeing email notifications of comments either since the recent changes.
I’m still confused.
My "latest post":https://blogs.nature.com/austinelliott/2010/09/08/the-grass-may-be-green-somewhere-but-the-blue-skies-here-look-pretty-dark currently has five comments.
On the "recent blog posts":https://network.nature.com/blogs/posts/recent page, nothing is indicated about whether it has comments (which is usually what happens when there are no comments).
On the "Nature Network":https://network.nature.com/ front page it actually says "0 comments".
Shurely shome mishtake?
Just commented to point out that my "latest post,":https://blogs.nature.com/austinelliott/2010/09/08/the-grass-may-be-green-somewhere-but-the-blue-skies-here-look-pretty-dark which has 5 comments, helpfully shows as "0 comments" on the Nature Network front page, and with no indication about comments at all on the recent blogs page.
Unfortunately, you can’t see the original version of my comment saying this… as it is stuck in the spam filters.
Austin, we’re looking into why that particular post of yours hasn’t updated the number of comments. I’ve also added you as a "trusted commenter" on this blog so hopefully there won’t be any more swallowing of your comments by the spam filter. As usual, I think it was a case of exceeding the magic number of URLs that triggered it…
Frank – noted about your email notifications. I’ll add you to the list.
Thanks, Lou. Mysterious place, the blogosphere…
UPDATE: As of Friday afternoon all of the active NN blogs have been republished so each should have the new features enabled. We can now switch the updates from MT to NN (ie things like number of comments on a post) back to occurring at a normal speed (i.e. 2-3 mins, not 1-2 hours).
If you spot a blog that has has not been updated (and I haven’t yet done every one from the archive) please let me know.
Any reason why the number of new comments can’t appear more or less instantaneously, as it did on the old NN? It reminds me of energy-saving lightbulbs: "progress" as poorer performance.
Just curious
p.s. Anyone else incredibly annoyed that NN assumes I want 2 line breaks when I hit ‘return’? It’s not always the case, but it seems completely out of our control.
Do the new features include an improved (I don’t know what to call it) filter? I seem to be receiving a lot of Network invitations from
Spamfem-bots… the latest being someone called Samanta Efemena! For all the hoo-haa about registration, how are these irritants still sneaking through?I have no idea if this is the right place to post this, but the "Your Replies" feature on the Snapshot page is busted. It claims I haven’t replied to anything (including this reply right here… yes I time-traveled into the future to check), when we all know that I’ve left several erudite, clever and timely responses to things here and there.
Jenny – the problem with updating the comments is that rather than having everything within NN as we used to on the old system, we now have to get MT to notify NN when someone leaves a comment. This currently takes 2-3 mins and it is possible that as part of the back-end improvements to the site that are currently taking place, we will be able to optimise this some more.
Kausik – spam is something that we’re currently looking at as a separate issue. Improving the detection of it by our filters is just one of the ways of dealing with it, but as I’m sure you can appreciate, tackling spam is one of those constant arms races…
Richard – how long ago did you leave your comment? There will still be a delay with that section updating, but it should work after a couple of hours. If it’s not updating at all, then we have a problem.
At least those comments update… eventually.
At the risk of harping on, my post on blue skies vs, quote, "commercially useful" research, which has 5 comments, is STILL showing up indicating no comments at all.
Does that make it more, or less, likely that a casual browser would go and read it?
The answer, I think, is obvious.
Lou – it’s not updating at all, and for me it doesn’t show any comments left, ever. Completely blank.
Perhaps NN looked into the future and took revenge on me for complaining about this now. Or something.
Also: "Your session has expired. Please log in again to leave a comment." <-WTF is this? Come on, can you not implement a website with proper persistent login?
I’ve about had it with NN at this point.
For the record, my orange button still doesn’t show up until I refresh (Firefox), in case anyone thought the Safari fix was all-inclusive.
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