Thursday, June 24, 2010

Hopefully you noticed that I spent the last few days redesigning the website. It was long overdue. I was really tired of the look of the old website and it wasn't organized in a way that let you get at a good look at all of the news that was available on the site. I hope you agree that the new design is much less crappy than the old one. At the very least its cleaner and has more white space :)

I also decided to remove a few of the "features" i had programmed in before. I took out the citation manager because it really served no purpose other than to let you share and recommend citations to your friends and lab mates. I just saw it as a very watered down version of cite-u-like and I don't think it would get much use. Plus it took up a lot of valuable real-estate in the user navigation menu...

Additionally, I removed the blogs link. Previously I had allowed anyone with an account to have a blog, but more recently only spammers have been using it to post about casino deals or post lame press releases about healthcare technology. Sorry, but I'm not giving away free advertising! I have since decided to recruit a number of my scientist friends to write blogs for the website. I'll put up a more detailed post about who they are and what they will be writing about in the next few days. It should get pretty exciting around here in the next couple of months!

As far as the re-design is concerned, I'm not completely done yet. I still have to replace a couple of the button graphics with the right color scheme and I need to add a background to the site so that the white space isn't blinding on widescreen monitors. I'll be tweaking for the next couple of weeks, so if you have any comments or suggestions, please post them below!

Finally, I plan on adding three more major modules to the site in the coming weeks. Firstly, I will be adding an award and spam reporting system. This is to coincide with a contest I will be holding over the next few months to get you guys to help me find cool external news links. The idea is that you will get points for every submitted and approved newslink. You will get points for posting comments of news articles and blogs. Now, the fun part is that you can also get points from other community members for your article comments, similar to the system employed by Digg and reddit. Un-like Digg and Reddit, these points will be tallied into monthly and all time totals. I have acquired a large pile of swag from Eton Bio, IDT DNA, and Invitrogen and will give out prize packages including T-shirts, mugs, pens, notebooks, etc. for the top 3 users every month!

The second major module I plan to add is a craig's list type marketplace for trading lab equipment and list available jobs. Nothing fancy just a free place to post an ad and a couple of pictures. All ads will be deleted after 60 days and I'll even host image thumbnails for you! This should be pretty easy and quick to code, so maybe I'll have it up in a few weeks!

Finally, It may not seem like a lot of effort to keep the news up to date on LabSpaces since all I do is post press release from other sources, but it is a lot of work :P I'm planning on adding a special type of account to the website to allow University press offices to post the press releases directly to the website. This way I can get the press release generators posting their release information and all I have to do is screen them for content. As it is now, even with my magical press release scraping script for my top press release sources, it takes me about 3 hours every day to set up the news queue. I hope that getting the universities to take up some of the slack in this department will help take some of the time load off of me.