We have some ambitious goals ahead of us, from art to videos, tax-exempt status and more, but there is one more thing that I think we should strive for in the coming year – making the news. We are indexed by Google News, so in that sense we are making news as we report and comment on what goes on in the world. But what I mean is making a big enough impact in the world that other news organizations start reporting on us. The more reaching out we can do, the more people may come here and exchange ideas, contribute articles, and learn about science. I know that we have a good following amongst scientists, and it would be great if we could bring more people into the discussion.

We’re also on our way to a bigger league.

At the beginning of December, I thought that we had gotten to the point where a Wikipedia article about our organization (which is more than just a blog) was appropriate, giving the bare-bones rundown on what we do. Other organizations such as the Non GMO Project and GM Watch have pages, of varying quality, why not us? I built it over a few days and it went up on December 6. A few editors helped out with improving it, and suggesting links to de-orphan the page, and everything seemed fine.

Then, right on the New Year, an editor flagged it for deletion. Over about a week, various editors chimed in on how big of a mention in different news sources was big enough of a mention for notability, and I provided what more information I could to help out. I tried to point out politely when a couple editors were not even bothering to read some of the sources, and made sure they were aware that I both created the page and am a founder of the site in question. In the end, our page was deleted, with not enough of a strong ‘keep’ vote from other editors.

I thought it was ironic that editors were arguing that I myself may be notable but Biofortified is not – even though my notability in this case stems from what I have done here on Biofortified. Kind of odd, don’t you think?

I’m not worried about the deletion, because all of my work (and other editors’ additions) has been saved, and the entire thing can go back up once we have but a few more references to meet the oft-arbitrary guidelines of notability. So here’s another incentive for us to make some news!

I would like to solicit some ideas of things that we can do this year. There is on-the-ground public outreach and events, online gatherings, and additional resources that can be put together on the site. What would you like to see?

I thought one fun thing we could do is organize a book reading of the original Frankenstein, which could involve virtual meetings over Google+ or a webinar-type site. Or should we dress up like fools and get people to sign a petition to ban genetic recombination? Serious and silly, there are many ways to get messages out there. Let us know in the comments!

Let’s make 2012 be the year we make some serious news.

There were many ways to contribute: Paypal donations, merchandise, telling your friends, and good ol’ fashioned checks in the mail. Bit by bit donations were rolling in, and I can also tell you that someone, somewhere, is the proud owner of a calendar featuring cheesecake shots of yours truly.

A week ago we got to less than $100 of our goal, but then at the end of the week we suddenly passed it and then some. With the fundraising drive now at a close, we come to the moment you have all been waiting for. How much did Biofortified raise toward our goal for 2012?

Drum roll please……

$2443.06! $2491.66! $2540.26!

That is super sweet – and I’m not saying that just because I’m an ear of corn! Thanks to the generosity of our readers, (and of other blogs as well), we have vastly exceeded our goal for this year. We have the funds to get all of these projects rolling, with a cushion to carry us into the next year. Thank you every person who contributed! You have the gratitude of a plush ear of corn – and there’s nothing in the world greater than that (or so I’m told)!

The future of this site and its growth has been secured. Now comes all the hard work of following through on all these goals. I can only type so fast with these little husks, so I’ll leave that up to the humans. Now I’ve got to look presentable for my trips to Washington D.C., so I think I’m going to need to get a tux. What do you mean there’s no room in the budget for Cobnobbing?

Clockwise from bottom left: Benny F. Broccoli, Stem Cell, E. coli, Bookworm, Chanten A. Carrot, and Frank, hanging around their metal holiday cactus!

Happy New Year one and all! Frank N. Foode here to give you an update on Biofortified’s fundraising drive for 2012. We’ve got big plans for the blog for this next year, and that means taking in some big money to make it possible. Last week, we announced that we wanted to raise $2012 for 2012, and almost one week later, I am pleased to announce that we are almost all the way there!

Donations have been coming in from all over the place. Word of mouth has spread amongst public scientists, who have been providing the bulk of donations. We’re sending along a little blog shwag to a really generous group that is part of a nonprofit breeding foundation, who not only gave personal donations, but also encouraged their colleagues to do the same! I think we may have picked up some readers in the process too.

PZ Myers, possibly the most cuddly cuttlefish in the world, stepped in to promote our effort on Pharyngula, and soon enough some science blog supporters came in and moved the needle as well! Thank you PZ, and thank you everyone from the Pharyngulation horde!

Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for. As of today, Biofortified has raised $1765.79 toward our $2012 goal! That’s almost 88% of the way there, with only $246.21 left to go. I know we can do it! Just look at the corn plant in the sidebar – the tassels are just starting to bloom!

I spent my holiday season with some friends, as I hope all of you did. I told them how excited I am about the coming year and all the things we want to do. And they told me I should put myself out there more. I have to say as far as plants go, I’m quite the adventurous type, and one thing I really hope to do this year is a lot more traveling. See more people, attend more conferences, and travel to more exotic lands to help bring genetics cheer to all the girls and boys of the world. I’ve got many helpers just aching to take me on a trip to a museum, the farmer’s market, or to a foreign country. A small donation from each of you can help get me there.

For example, this summer I went on a trip to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, or CIMMYT. While I was there, I had a grand old time, and you can see the whole experience here in our photo album. I just heard that I will also have the opportunity to join a grad student on a trip to Ecuador this summer, and I’m just aching to go – but we need to buy my ticket there! Luckily, I travel pretty light, and First Class for me runs about $20 round-trip. If you would like to see more awesome photo journals of my journeys like these, please consider making a donation!

There’s another way you can help, too. You can help support my travels around the world by buying your very own 2012 calendar that shows some of the awesome places I have been! From rice in Thailand, to Wheat in Mexico, and DNA helices in Chicago, each month you can join me in some place new and help me go on adventures to put in next year’s calendar. We’ve only sold one so far, but if there is enough interest in a Frank N. Foode calendar, then next year we will fill the days of the calendar with custom days like Gregor Mendel and Norman Borlaug’s birthday, and events like the World Food Prize, and Biofortified’s Birthday! You’ll never forget these important dates again! 25% of the price will go to support the blog. Everyone needs a calendar, why not make it one with me, Frank?

That’s it for now, I hope your new year was as warm and cozy as mine, and that the new year of blogging here at Biofortified will be better than the last!

Oh, one more thing, I thought I would give y’all a little teaser…

Now what am I going to do in this place?

Money Matters

In 2009, due to an outpouring of support from the science blogging community and from our readers for what we’re trying to do, we won a contest that provided our blog with a $1,500 grant that helped us revamp the site, pay for hosting and purchase prizes to build a community of readers, and get some more diverse content on the blog. Now, after two years our grant is running out and we are going to need more funds to continue to keep our blog community going strong, and expand it with some more projects.

First, our expenses have mainly been spent on Promotion (prizes, posters, shipping), hosting costs (server, domains, photo album), conference reporting (gas, train, cheap motel), and site development (graphic design, plugins). Here is a visual breakdown of what proportion we have spent on each area. For those who are new to Biofortified – those who write here do so as volunteers, so our funds do not go to pay for what is written on the blog.

You no doubt may have noticed a section for Transcription in the above pie chart. That’s because we have hired a student who is writing some excellent transcripts of audio and video interviews we’ve done that I will post on the blog in the next couple days. This will make it easier for people to read, reference, and check back on these interviews. We would like to continue to make these transcripts available, and in fact, some will be absolutely necessary. I have a really good 2-hour phone interview I conducted earlier this year that will need to be transcribed before I can do something with it.

Another major expense that we would like to be able to make is to commission artwork. Communicating science depends as much on art as it does science, and we’ve got some great artists on call who can make us some killer graphics for improving the look of the site, for videos, and informational pages. An artist can also help us realize an attractive and thought-provoking T-shirt design for the blog.

And let’s not forget our long-term project of cataloging and summarizing all existing research on the relative risks of genetic engineering, a project we call GENERA. This will take a significant amount of money, which we do not expect to be able to gather this time around. But there is something we can do which will make funding that project possible: tax exemption.

As a science education and discussion organization, we would qualify for tax-exemption, and we would do it if we had the money for the filing fees. Not only would it make it possible for future donors to deduct their donations, it would also open up more opportunities to continue and expand our projects because we would be eligible to apply for grants from many charities and nonprofit trusts that require tax-exemption. Being exempt also carries more reporting and transparency responsibilities, but we plan to go further with yearly financial reports published on the blog.

From now until mid-January, we will talk a bit about how reaching our funding goal of $2012 for 2012 will be able to help us do the things I mentioned above and more, and how important this is.

How you can help

There are several ways that you can help us reach our goal. The first is you could give a donation through our PayPal account by clicking this button here or in the sidebar:

Any amount is great and welcome. If you would like to get some idea what your donation can help us do, here are some suggested amounts:

• $5 will buy a big spool of thread for embroidering tote bags.
• $10 will get a prize sent to a community contest winner.
• $20 will send Frank N. Foode on a plant-based adventure chronicled in our photo album.
• $35 will pay for one month of hosting costs for the blog and photo album.
• $50 will pay for a transcript of a normal interview.
• $100 will allow us to travel to and report on a conference.
• $150 will pay for some graphic art to be commissioned for the blog or for video projects.
• $200 will pay for the transcription of an in-depth interview.
• $400 will pay the application fee for tax-exempt status.

Paypal takes a small cut of each donation (2.5%), so if you want to minimize this impact on your donation and send it by check, please contact us for an address to send it to.

If you choose to make a direct donation, let us know if you would like to be acknowledged by name – we would love to tell the world how you have helped us, but if you wish to remain anonymous we respect that – and we will thank you by email. (Also, just a friendly reminder – our policy is not to accept direct funding from for-profit corporations.)

Never miss a planting date with Frank!

If you want to contribute, but would like to get something for your donation, there is another way you can help out. As Anastasia reported, we have a Zazzle store with many fabulous pieces of merchandise such as blog mugs, clothing, ornaments, a mousepad, and even a Frank N. Foode 2012 Calendar as well! 25% of sale prices will go directly to Biofortified.

Are you not in a position where you could donate money, but would still like to help us reach our goal? Please consider promoting our fundraising drive to your friends, family, contacts, exercise partners, in your smoke-filled rooms, your social networks, and your underground food pantry co-ops. We have all kinds of nifty promotion buttons below the post for social media, email, and heck, PDFs and printing which you can use to help spread the word. How ever you help out, you can brag about it in the comments of this post and get accolades from everyone! Tell everyone on your own blog and dare your readers to do better. Be creative!

Because we will. Frank will keep you posted on our progress in the sidebar with a color-changing corn plant, so you can see how far along we are. As a matter of fact, we’re already off to a great start. We have gotten some sales in our Zazzle Store, as well as a sudden surge of support through individual donations. As of today, I’m pleased to report that we have already raised $871.19! We are two fifths of the way there! Thanks to everyone who has helped us out so far.

Let’s make 2012 be a banner year for Biofortified, and help us raise $2012 to make it happen. Only $1140.81 left to go!
Thank you for considering supporting what we do here at Biofortified. I hope you are having a great Holiday Season and that we all have a fantastic and fruitful New Year.

For this community contest, the stakes were high. With two tote bags, two books, and a Norman Borlaug coin up for grabs, it took ingenuity, creativity, and sewing acuity to make an entry that stood out. We had Luscious of Borg dress as a living work of art with her Son of Man outfit, and an aptly-named and mustached “flavor saver” pumpkin by Richard R. and son. So far, excellent! (One judge was forced to recuse himself as he painted the apple on Ms. of Borg’s face.)

"I find your lack of pith disturbing"

Then CulturaBiotech pulled some maize out o’ the old packet and whipped up a Bt Corn Darth Vader. Stepping outside the pumpkin box, (and into a freeze dryer flask?) it sure caught the attention of the judges.

Then SkepticalVegan posted his entry… Frank N. Foode. Hey that’s my name. Wait, what?

Holy Compost! It’s me, but I’m like almost 2 meters tall! He’s got my hair, eyes, and lab coat with a name tag.  I hear he also passed out cards on Halloween advertising our blog. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need to hear any more!

The decision of the editors was swift, so I am pleased to announce the winners for Biofortified’s second annual Carving and Costume Contest:

Human by day, biotech corn by night

First place goes to Skeptical Vegan for being the first person with tassels of steel to dress as Frank N. Foode for Halloween! He will receive a blog tote bag, a Norman Borlaug coin, and a autographed hardcover edition of Denialism by Michael Specter!

Second place goes to Cultura Biotech for showing us the power of the dark side of The Force with her Bt Darth Vader. She will receive a blog tote bag and she also chose our second paperback copy of Denialism.

Science denialism must have everyone scared this Halloween, and now we’re out of that book! There are still so many more to choose from in future contests! Also, both of our winners have blogs of their own – check em out and see what they’re talking about!

So now with the second annual carving and costume contest done, I had a lot of work to do getting this pile of prizes ready to go. Armed with some cotton thread, the new tote bags have been finished, stuffed with goodies, and are on their way to the new winners’ (and previously mentioned winners’) places of residence, research, or world domination. And just in time for Cornmas!

This is the first time that biotech food actually involved a needle!

Thank you everyone for participating, and also thank the Non-GMO Project for letting us advertise this contest in their event calendar. It doesn’t look like any entries came from there, but who knows about next year?

And stay tuned this week, because we’ve got some important things to talk about as the blog continues into the new year, and some great news, too!

Now our blog’s community page is a breath of fresh air. Take a look, find yourself in it and how you appear to others visiting the site. For those who are not familiar with this yet, registered users have community pages that they can use to write a bit about themselves, flag favorite posts, link to facebook (or Google+) profiles, and put up pictures. Registered users also get a chance to win community contests – and there will be another one of these soon.

And from the last couple weeks, I have not seen any new spam users show up, so I think the new registration confirmation process is working. It is nice to actually see the accounts of users on this site! Fantastic.

We started having site errors that coincided with our move to Dreamhost – but we couldn’t tell if it was entirely due to that, or the large assortment of plugins we have installed on the site to make everything from the Forum, Community pages, Syndication, and GENERA work. It seems that the problem was a combination of both issues. Each plugin takes up a certain amount of server RAM to run, and the hosting account only let us use so much. Unlimited disk space, yes. Unlimited Bandwidth, yes. But should our site use more than a certain piddly amount of active memory – comments are lost and authors have trouble saving their posts. We had to pay more for more memory, but it did not fix the problems. When our site went down (again) due to server errors early last week, within hours we were in agreement that it was time to get off of Dreamhost.

You learn a little bit along the way, that Unlimited space and bandwidth doesn’t mean much without the memory to process it. And a website host with no uptime guarantees? I went through a lot of hosts looking for these essential requirements, and one that we came across, and eventually decided upon, was GreenGeeks. We settled on a virtual private server of sufficient memory, and signed up. A little shakiness with the transfer, and we were done.

Immediately, I have noticed a remarkable difference in load times, and upload and download times via FTP as well. I am impressed with the speed, indeed. But that’s not the best part about GreenGeeks. They’re wind-powered. So we can blog only as long as the wind is blowing! Just kidding. They purchase wind energy credits for three times the amount of energy used by the servers, so now by blogging more we’re actually making the environment better! (It’s the neoliberal dream. Quick: alert Michael Pollan) So I hope you will all do your part to heal the planet and comment more frequently! Pitch in – Biofortified is triple-green! (Note: this does not include your home computers, you energy-grubbing Earth-wreckers!)

Now that we have moved to a more capable place, I’ll be making a few changes to make things more accessible. Believe it or not, we actually have 791 registered users on the blog – and more come in daily. This is not a good thing, because most of these are automatic spam registrations that seem to bypass the required fields that people need to enter to sign up for the blog. Our community page, which displays all registered users, was getting choked with these and so I added a temporary fix that filtered out all users that haven’t left comments. The result is odd numbers of users on each community page, if you have noticed. Awkward to navigate.

This must change, and so now I am announcing the Great Biofortified User Purge of 2011. In a week, I will delete every user account that has zero comments. Only those who are actively a part of the community will have their accounts saved. Just one comment saves your login form the chopping block, and when it is all done, we’ll have a more secure block against registration spam to ensure that the community pages are for the blog community, and not web-crawling bots. I will send an email to all registered user accounts instructing their holders to log in and comment just once to make sure that they don’t have to register again. If you have commented before with your account you are already done. If you are reading this, and signed up recently but have yet to comment – now’s your chance!

That’s the news, so I’m looking forward to seeing how much awesomeness we can pack into our new server space. Happy biofortified blogging!

Moving to soil with a better pH

Update: Biofortified is now in the process of transferring to a new web host, please bear with us as we make this transition. Comments are temporarily disabled.

Update 2: Biofortified has completed the move to our new server – comments are re-enabled!

*****

You probably noticed the downtime that we experienced Monday afternoon. And memories of previous page loading errors are not far behind. Well, we are finally fed up with our current website host, and are planning to make a move – very soon. Maybe in two days. So while I comb the internet for good, reliable web hosts, I thought I might ask our readers if they knew of any? (Don’t say Dreamhost because that’s the nightmare that we’ve been experiencing!)

Biofortified is not a huge site, nor does it eat up a lot of bandwidth. But probably as a consequence of the number of plugins that we have running on our WordPress installation, it does eat up a pretty significant amount of server memory. This is why we were having errors in the past, until we bumped up the memory limits about a month ago, which seemed to solve the memory problems, but costs a little more dough. So memory, in the range of 400 MB, is one thing we will definitely need. Next, an uptime guarantee is essential. Dreamhost apparently does not have any such guarantee. (Even so, the typical 99.9% guarantee still leaves room for 8 hours of downtime per year.) Any suggestions? Please let me know in the comments.

I mentioned the cost factor. We are still riding on the grant that we got from the Changemakers contest, but there are a few things that we’re working on and planning to do that will put a strain on the blog’s remaining funds. There will be an announcement soon about how you can help us out, but for now – help us find some new digs for the blog!

Ok, so yesterday I got an exciting package in the mail, and I’m afraid that I can’t keep this thing under wraps for very long, because you are going to hear about it sooner or later through other media channels. A lot of people have taken an interest in our blog mascot, Frank N. Foode, and it got me thinking about what could be done to satisfy that interest, and teach people about genetics and genetic engineering. I talked about it with my friends and family, and decided to try and see if there could be some way to make and sell an educational Frank N. Foode toy. Brainstorming this concept was easy, but getting everyone on board to put this together was hard. I got a hold of a toy manufacturer and a marketing company, which was surprisingly easy in retrospect, but the hardest part was convincing a seed company to go along with it. Because not only did I want to try putting Frank on some store shelves, I also wanted to put seeds in each box. Not just any seeds, in fact. Genetically engineered sweet corn seeds, and a second packet of “Mystery Mutant” seeds. I want to bring plant genetics up close and personal to kids, teenagers, and adults, and I think this could be the way to do it. And for all those who have been aching to get your own Frank doll, this is your chance!

There’s quite a bit of backstory and thought that went into putting this product together, so rather than write it all out, when they sent me a sample of the finished product to me I grabbed a little video camera and explained it all on camera. After I recorded the footage, I realized that the details may not come in very clear, so I snapped some shots of the box as well, which are below. Without any further ado, I give you: Your very own Frank ‘N’ Foode:

Box images so you can better see what I am talking about. Here is the front:

Left side and back:

Front and right side:

Back flap opened (click on this one):

License Agreement (only drawback to getting GE seeds):

Bottom with UPC and blog logo:

As this gets rolled out in a few stores in the next month, I am trying to gather all links to sites that comment on it, so please use the comments to notify me of any as they come out. This will be a very exciting time for me and for the blog as well, and I want to capture it all as it happens. As I mentioned in the video, 50% of net profits will go to support the blog. I will let you know as soon as they are available in stores if any of you should want to get one of your own.

I toyed around with a wordpress plugin that was supposed to do this automatically, but for some reason it wouldn’t work. When you visit a page, it was supposed to store a cookie on your computer that would have a record of the time you last visited the blog. But every test I tried (if you noticed my comments) didn’t work, and it was displaying errors even when unmodified by me. Eventually, I realized that I understood the code that was the basis of this plugin, and decided to write my own plugin. An hour in the evening, and half an hour in the morning, I had a working plugin on our testing server. I added a nice image of a sunflower Gazania to indicate new comments, and if it wasn’t for some odd server-wide inaccessibility problems we were having, it would have been activated last night. And a final test this morning revealed that it needed one more component to work properly – something that took into consideration the timezone of the site – otherwise it would have only flagged comments older than exactly 6 hours – which, as I now believe, is why the original plugin didn’t work. Hah!

So I am pleased to announce that when you visit a post or a page for a second time or more, you will have this handy-dandy flower to help you draw your eyes to comments that were made since your last visit. If you refresh the page or leave a new comment yourself, however, the flower will be gone. And when you leave a new comment it will highlight that comment when the page reloads. Give it a test drive on this post – try leaving comments, refreshing, and leaving more! Have fun, and enjoy conversing on and into the future.