Chemistry Blog

Generic Website Upgrades

As most readers have noticed we’ve done a massive revamping of the website since Jan 1st 2008. Site upgrade posts are the most boring, so I’ll do everyone a favor and write it in outline format.

• An unfortunate circumstance of the upgrades have been the inability to migrate all comments made prior to Jan 1st 2008 to the new site. The old comments are still archived at Chemical Forums Blog.
• The ‘anonymous’ blogger mebecker1 has joined the staff of the blog. (read postings)
• We have a new domain name. No longer http://blog.chemialforums.com we are now http://www.chemistry-blog.com.
  
• I’ve been digging into WordPress source code and have done some rewrites. Such as…
  • Each commenter now has a unique color for their name based on a formula using the non-identifying portion of their ip address. So, if someone magically broke the formula, they still would end up with a useless portion of the ip. Trolls like to post comments under several names, and this ensures “anonymous-honesty” in some sense.
  • I’ve also added to the MySql database a visit counter field. It has been placed on every blog post and every page automatically. You can see our top viewed posts/pages here: Blog Stats
  • I passed the visit counter into our RSS feed as well: Chemistry-Blog Feed
  • I’ve removed all non-refer tags; all links from commenters will pass pagerank. So, including your website when you comment will be very beneficial for you. This might be dangerous, or awesome.
• Wrote several pages explaining who we are and other information. Bloggers, Frequently Asked Questions.

If anyone has any other suggestions for additions just leave a comment, I can program most anything. If you just want to see your comment color leave a comment.

Mitch