Updates « Biofortified

User Profiles and more

by Karl Haro von Mogel on 28 September 2010

Lately, discussion at Biofortified has been going strong. One post passed 100 comments, and another is about to do the same. People have started using the forum again, and registrations have also been coming in. Heck, immediately after our discussion with Jeffrey Smith, a few more people signed up to comment! Last week, we passed the 2,000 comment mark, in far less time than it took to get to the first kilo-comment. Let’s keep it going!

One of the things that we hope to build here is a community of people of all stripes, spots, and other allelic combinations who feel comfortable discussing issues in genetics and agriculture despite their disagreements. And hopefully coming out of that we may find that we have fewer disagreements than we started with. We try to put a face and words to the people who run and write the blog, and those who send in contributions – but there hasn’t been much of an opportunity to learn more about our regular readers and commentators, and for you to learn about each other. One of the things that makes this blog different is that we want people to discuss what we write about, and discuss what they want to write about, too. Just as we try to show how multidimensional we are, so too is everyone who sticks around on this blog. So to expand our possibilities, I’m happy to announce that very soon we will have a custom user profile system in place, and by very soon, I mean the end of the week.

Now syndicating feeds

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

Win another one?

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!

Name that database!

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.

We’re back!

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