Problems found, problems solved

Posted on by sanrehan

Hi all,

The goals for this week are to identify effective web design, begin to understand how to do this yourself, and consider how this form influences content and meaningful participation in scientific communities.  Today as a group we’ll begin this task. Following — or during — today’s class, please post a comment here identifying problems and/or potential solutions to online communication.

Thanks,

VSC and JAB

23 thoughts on “Problems found, problems solved”

  1. One major question: how can you assess whether your online communication is reaching the desired audience? How do you quantify “impact?”

    Some solutions: consider AddThis, Google Analytics, various metrics from social media…others?

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    1. Thanks Kenny! Also I just discovered that the “All in one SEO Pack” function that allows you to add a more search friendly title to your page (or blog entry), a brief description, and keywords. All of which are supposed to help improve the search-ability. At least for the theme I’m using it’s found at the bottom of the page, after the blog content box.

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  4. A problem I am having is connecting my undergraduate self to my graduate self. I got married before graduate school and my name change seems to have broken a thread. Any ideas of how to connect the dots?

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    1. I was just reading about the importance of site maps, navigation, and linking to connect all of the pieces of your online persona. Perhaps in a space like your blog you could add some links concerning your “undergraduate self,” so that when your “graduate self” is found online, it will be associated with your past involvements. This is what I was reading: http://www.evancarmichael.com/Technology/1098/5-Best-Ways-To-Make-Your-Website-Visible-To-Search-Engines.html

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    2. I asked my colleague Iago Hale (official UNH site http://biolsci.unh.edu/faculty/hale ; lab site http://www.halelab.org ) your question, since he had a different name when we hired him (not too long ago). Here is his reply, shared with his permission:

      “that’s a good question. i am lucky, i suppose, because i have no “reputation” that i’m trying to stay connected with. but i have thought about this, and it seems you have several strategies available:

      1. Continue to use your old name, professionally. I mean, journals and conferences don’t ask for a passport, right?
      2. If your old last name is your new middle name (common), insist that your middle name appears wherever your name is written. (e.g. include your new middle name as part of a two-name last name in publications, even though technically it is not your last name, etc.)
      3. Avail yourself of the manual correction options available in tools like Google Citations (i.e. you can tell Google that papers are yours, even if the name is different) and then make sure you have a clear link to that on your main site
      4. If you do have a main page for your lab or research, i imagine you can associate all your random names by pooling them in the bank of key words or tags for that site. or embed your old name invisibly in the site (white font on white background?) so that searches will find it. i’m just making stuff up now.
      5. Make sure all your past institutions know about your name change and have updated their databases (universities, grad schools, past employers).
      6. Don’t worry about it and trust that it will just work out (my strategy).

      perhaps somewhat helpful? hope all is well,
      i LOWE hale”

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      1. Thank You! This is so helpful! I have been using Nicole Morin Jaskiewicz, but I hadn’t thought to include my maiden name in keywords. I plan to add some links to my blog post today! And also, worry less!

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      2. I have been working on aggregating my undergraduate and my graduate persona into my blog. I added a page with links to my Undergraduate Experience Link. What do you think??

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  5. Pingback: Connecting online and offlineScientific Communication | Scientific Communication

  6. Anyone know how to exclude an image from a gallery? I want the three snowy images in a gallery at the top of my post and want the graph at the bottom of my post removed from the gallery, but still visible on the page.

    Based on the information here, I tried using the following in html mode:

    [gallery exclude="4"]

    but that doesn’t work. Any ideas?

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    1. Hey Liz,

      It is hard for me to test this thoroughly on my end right now but I have a few suggestions…

      I would recommend jumping into the html tab of your post and include the picture individually…

      Google search results

      This is example code for a picture I put on one of my posts. It looks confusing but it is like an onion… sets the caption. makes the picture a link. provides the web address of the photo on your blog and allows you adjust size. I think if you upload the three photos to your ‘media’ in your dashboard, your blog will give each photo a unique address and you should be able to essentially past the code of above three time, size them appropriately and be all set…

      Hope this is helpful and not daunting. Maybe you already solved this.

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      1. Thanks for the tip, Kenny. I gave up on the gallery for that post but will try your suggestion in the future.

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      2. Hi Liz,

        Now that I look at my response, I fully understand the question you asked me in person today about the ID #. It looks like many of the details of my response got lost because this comment system actually interprets HTML…

        Normally HTML uses “” but since the comment section will remove any HTML I insert… I will substitute ‘{‘ for ” for this explanation. I will put each piece of code on a new line although it would normally be all in one line.

        <– caption formatting goes first to caption everything in between

        {a href="http://tweetping.net/&quot;} <– this is a link for when you click the image

        {img class=" src="http://www.micropopbio.org/kmflynn5/files/2013/02/tweetping-p8hg6z.png&quot; width="698" height="534" /} <– this is the locaton of the image and size or formatting

        {/a} <– this closes the #a href designation to make everything in between 'clickable'

        Source: http://tweetping.net/ <– here is where you put the caption and close.

        To answer your question about the caption ID#, it seems to be arbitrary for our use so I would just leave it out.

        Hope this makes more sense…

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  7. This is dedicated more to work management of a project (esp. in business but it seems useful for collaborations)
    http://gigaom.com/2011/07/28/10-tools-to-improve-communication/

    Here’s a site with links on how to engage the general public:
    http://communicatingscience.aaas.org/

    This is the quote from that site that I thought was interesting:
    Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. — Albert Einstein

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  8. Colin asked this question on his blog and I thought it was worth asking here: “does anyone know how to add new posts to a page other than the main one?”

    I suspect that you can’t do this, or at least for most templates. Has anyone found a way to do this? Or is this getting beyond the capabilities of our blogs?

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    1. The only way I could think to do this would be to create a custom RSS feed to aggregate certain material for you.

      The idea being that if you have two topics with their own tag…. ‘pizza parties’ and ‘science’. You could create a new page, imbed an RSS feed that only retrieves posts with the ‘pizza parties’ tag and puts them on that new page. You could do the same for ‘science’ and eliminate the default ‘dump everything here’ blog page

      http://docs.appthemes.com/tutorials/redirect-wordpress-feed-feedburner/

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