ScienceBlogs v. 2.0

If all has gone according to planned*, the new version of the ScienceBlogs homepage should be up and running. Along with the new homepage comes a whole slew of new bloggers. Go on over and check it out. It should be totally awesome**.

* This is a scheduled post, so all may have not gone according to planned.

** I cannot guarantee awesomeness because I have yet to see the new page or many of the new blogs.

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The new front page is terrible, a true disaster. It's nothing but a gigantic advertisement for Seed magazine, it contains none of the information the old front page contained, and it apparently requires Flash in order to do... something, I'm not sure what since I don't have Flash. How do you get to the old front page, or the "no flash" page? Who thought this was a good idea?

If Seed wants to put a big "subscribe to Seed" ad clickthrough before getting to the front page, then that's their right since they are the ones providing this useful service in the first place. But you should at least provide, you know, something after the advertisement, or some of the information the front page used to contain. And requiring Flash just to see an index of websites-- I'm hoping the old missing information is hidden somewhere in that big awkward "NEED PLUGIN" block at the top, and I just can't see it since I don't have flash-- is something akin to a crime against humanity, or at least the world wide web.

If you people don't plan on doing so, I guess I'll never be looking at the front page of scienceblogs ever again, and neither I guess will anyone else who can't or won't install flash. If I want to read scienceblogs, I'll be forced to just navigate to the subblogs manually, or using google or something. Which is really too bad, since the old "cool stuff happening on scienceblogs today, by topic" form of the old front page was literally the best organizational scheme of any blog community I've ever seen.

Wait; Now the old front page is back. I am confused.

Okay, now I notice that this article is actually from June. I guess the "new front page" they're referring to is, in fact, just the normal, well-done front page scienceblogs has had since I started using it.

For about ten minutes there, when I looked at the front page, I got a large mystery block of flash and an ad for Seed, and nothing else. During this time, this "ScienceBlogs v. 2.0" blog post here was listed as #1 on the "top 5 most emailed", and I jumped to the conclusion that they had, for whatever reason, replaced the front page with an ad and a big block of flash, not having noticed this article is six months old. Then after I posted, the normal front page reappeared.

Apparently, I'm an idiot?