Three Stories

This ("three stories about science and the web") - in particular Mike's reply to the first comment - cheered me up today. Heh.

Got me thinking. Journals carrying lonely hearts ads aren't a terrible idea. I mean, people who read the same niche journals have similar professional interests, probably go to the same conferences...

Anyway, Bioinformatics Zen is full of good stuff. Check it out if you haven't already.

Activity aggregation

Over at Nascent I just blogged about a pet project - building an aggregator for scientific contributions outside of the literature. This idea came out of conversations within NPG and has been gestating for a while. I had a rough prototype at Scifoo but things haven't progressed very far since then.

Connotea & Postgenomic complaints

I was catching up on my Bloglines subscriptions and came across Tiageo's 'Pissed with Connotea' post about some complaints he had about some NPG products. I was going to reply in a comment but figured that T's points are worth addressing here, too.

1. [Connotea] Performance and downtime: Sometimes to submit a citation takes ages, or the service is down (although, regarding downtime, it seems to be getting better).

Yeah. This is something that has plagued Connotea recently though it is getting better as you say. Unfortunately the solutions aren't as easy as you might think. Ian Mulvany - who runs the site - was saying earlier that they're looking at adding a new server this week, which should help.

2. Postgenomic: When I tried to use it, it was mostly down. Want anedoctical evidence? If you search now (as of the posting date of this entry) for postgenomic on google, the cached page says: “Unable to select database”, nothing more.
3. Postgenomic again: A few months I submitted my blog. I got no answer at all.

These are also fair enough but I should point out that Postgenomic isn't an NPG product - it's run by me. NPG do let me keep developing it during work hours.

What I'm saying is - don't blame NPG, blame me. ;)

Downtime hasn't been a problem for Postgenomic recently, I don't think (I check it every day and it has been fine) but there *was* a long standing issue to do with firewalls and TCP/IP expiry timestamps that I won't bore you with - suffice to say that it meant that pages wouldn't load correctly on some platforms and that it's fixed now.

I know about the Google thing. It's a bit embarrassing but I haven't gotten round to doing anything about it yet..

re: not replying to your email... I'm normally quite good at getting back to people quickly (no, really). I found yours again and my excuse is that I was on a plane to SFO when I read it - must have put it on the 'to do' pile and forgotten about it. Sorry. :(

As a side note you're listed now.

HTH.