by Karl Haro von Mogel on 25 August 2010 For more genetically engineered goodness!
For almost a year we have been anticipating this. It was one of the specific items that I brought up during the Changemakers contest as to why we needed the grant money. I’m talking, of course, about the ability to syndicate feeds from contributor’s blogs – but not only that – to have it automatic, hands-free, and self-formatting for this blog. Like many a layperson might be able to imagine a genetically engineered plant that they would not know how to transform, setting up this capability was beyond the coding abilities of the geneticists editing this blog. I for one, have learned about html and php through fiddling as a geneticist might make a mutation and study its downstream effects. Although the metaphor may seem backwards, it makes perfect sense to me to see lines of computer code as if they were analogous to genes and not the other way around.  But like many genes in a genome database, there’s no easy annotation for special features for blog plugins that don’t yet exist. Rather than wait for natural variation to give something for bloggers to select for, we had to call on the help of an intelligent designer to produce it ex nihilo.
Charles Johnson created the highly versatile plugin, FeedWordPress, which allows you to subscribe to feeds on other blogs to import their posts into your own. It was perfect for a group blog like Biofortified with authors that already have their own blogs to manage, except it imported the whole post without any pleasing front-page breaks. I got in touch with Charles and he agreed to
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 18 June 2010 We all remember what happened the last time Biofortified entered a voting contest, so when I was reminded about the Bloggers Choice Awards for 2010 by PZ Myers (who was entered into several categories himself), I thought we could give it a shot in the Best Food Blog and Best Blog Design categories. Be a part of the next blog contest victory to help spread the word about our fabulous posts and awesome design!
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 15 June 2010 In the forum, Anastasia announced that we’re working on a search-able database of the safety studies that have been conducted on GE crops. Our goal is to help people know about and understand the depth of research there has been on these crops, and be able to browse and search among them for details. And we especially want the fact that there has been a large amount of independent research on them to be widely known.
I’m happy to report that the initial testing phase of the features of this new database has been completed, and I am putting together the final version of our interface both on the front end and the back end. The whole system will work within the Biofortified blog posts and hasn’t necessitated dipping into our extensive war chest. But we will need a little bit of help from you.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 19 April 2010 Biofortified has successfully moved to its new, more frugal, yet more expansive home, after a week of [regrettably avoidable] downtime. The saga of this process is cataloged here for those who are interested. I know that our contributors have been itching to post about recent news, and a lot has happened in the last week, too! And now that we have unlimited space and bandwidth at a fraction of the cost, there’s all the
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 9 February 2010  For the second week in a row on my radio show on WSUM in Madison, I talked about plant genetics. Not that I’m trying to bore a general audience by discussing this topic over and over again, it’s just not every fortnight that you get to go to Berkeley to grub and elbow-rub with Michael Pollan. So naturally, I invited Anastasia on to the show for a half-hour discussion about blogging about plant genetics, our weekend in the Bay Area, Dinner with Michael, and we also talked about his new book, Food Rules. If you happened to listen to the mp3 I put up from our conversation at the Maize Genetics Conference, and you care to compare how we sound talking about genetic engineering 11 months later, I have just uploaded it to Inoculated Media, feel free to hop on over there to punch up the audio. The interview begins at 18:30 into the program.
One of the things that we discovered while kicking around my place of origin is that we could very easily keep talking about GE crops and related issues until our voices ran out. We covered a lot of ground and have since thought that it would be nice to share some of those thoughts in more ways than just through written paragraphs. We recorded a video conversation right after we got back to my folk’s place from Chez Panisse, which I should have edited pretty soon, for example, and then there’s also the interview for my radio show. But we would like to do more. What do y’all think about a Biofortified podcast?
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About Biofortified Biofortified's volunteer authors are devoted to providing factual information and fostering discussion about agriculture, especially plant genetics and genetic engineering. The site is written by grad students, professors, and guest experts. Meet our authors on the Authors page.
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