Space and astronomy news
If you’re looking for another popcultury podcast to listen to, here’s a link to the most recent episode of the Caustic Soda Podcast, featuring me. They wanted to talk about comets, meteorites and asteroids, so they thought I’d somehow be able to elevate the conversation. Did I? You be the judge. Here’s a link to the episode. Thanks guys!
I know I mentioned that I was on Google+ a couple of days ago, but I just wanted to give you another reminder. Since I did that post, Pamela and I did a live recording of Astronomy Cast during a Google+ Hangout. I’ve also done Hangouts with Phil Plait, Chris Pirillo, Adrian West, Jon Voisey, Jay Cross, and other Universe Today friends, writers and supporters. I’ve been trying to coordinate at least a Hangout a day right now, figuring things out; it’s been a lot of fun. If you’re looking for an invite to Google+, just send me an email at [email protected], and I’ll get you hooked up.
Just in case you were wondering, I’m on Google+. Not that I use it much yet, I’m still in the “kicking the tires” stage, but if you want to encircle me. Here’s a link to my profile… I think.
I’ll let the other Universe Today team members link up their profiles… if they choose, in the comments.
The folks at Dragon*Con have decided to decline having me as a guest this year. I already have my plane tickets, hotel booked, so I’m still going to go – I just signed up with a regular membership. It’s too bad, but then, this gives me the freedom to just enjoy the convention as a fan, and not have to participate in panels, help promote the convention through Universe Today, etc. I think we’re still going to do an episode of Astronomy Cast live, just because that’s so much fun. I’m bringing the whole family: wife, kids, even the mother-in-law. Anyway, you’ll see me lurking around the Astronomy Cast booth, or watching panels. It should be a fun vacation. 🙂 See you there!
For those who want to learn a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes at Universe Today, here are a couple of interviews I did recently with Search Engine Journal and SEO Theory.
And if you missed it, you might really enjoy this video interview at ThinkTraffic.
Just to warn you, these are webmastery, not spacey.
Hi everyone, if you look over on the right-hand side of the page I’ve added the new Google +1 button to every page on the site. Now you can click that button to endorse pages on the site that you enjoyed. An obvious place to click that button is on the Universe Today homepage. 🙂
If you’re wondering what the +1 button is, here’s what Google has to say. +1 is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.” Let visitors recommend your pages right in Google search results and help your site stand out. Here’s more info on the +1.
P.S. Happy Birthday Dad…
Oh, and this is for Empire Ave. Everyone else ignore it. {EAV_BLOG_VER:7ce92688539bb819}
You might have noticed that the comments for Universe Today look and behave a little differently today. That’s because we’re testing out a commenting platform called Disqus. If everything works out, it should provide a more feature rich, better looking, spam-defending comment system. The other cool thing is that it’s integrated with the rest of the Disqus network. Once you create a profile, you can write comments on thousands of other websites without having to create a profile on each one – something like this is going to be the future, so we might as well get on board now. Since Disqus is focused on creating the best possible commenting system, we should get carried along as they make improvements.
It’s still importing comments in from the WordPress system, so that’s going to take a few hours/days. Once that’s done, comments made in Disqus will be mirrored within WordPress, so we can always retreat to that system if this doesn’t work.
There’s one important decision that I still haven’t resolved yet: Who Can Comment? It can be set so anybody can reply to an article, which means there will be a lot of SPAM, but a lot of comments. I can tighten it down more (the current setting), so only registered users can comment. Or I can tighten it down even further so that users need to validate their email. I’m leaning towards the tightest control already, since I had a few nasty SPAM comments come in when I had it on the most open settings.
Anyway, let me know if you run into any problems. Let me know if things are displaying strangely for you, or you’re having trouble registering with the system.
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today
This isn’t exactly space news, but here’s a behind-the-scenes video interview with me and Think Traffic’s Corbett Barr. It’s about how I run Universe Today, what I’ve done over the last few years to increase the traffic and number of subscribers, and the software company I co-founded to let other webmasters to the same thing.
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It might surprise you to know that I’ve never been to a rocket launch. Even though I’ve been publishing Universe Today for over 11 years, and written thousands of articles about space and astronomy, covering every aspect of the space industry, I’ve never actually experienced it first hand.
It’s the blessing and the curse of the internet, I guess. I started Universe Today in my spare time, from my house in Vancouver because it was possible. With myself as the journalist (and publisher), I didn’t need anyone’s permission to just start reporting. Thanks to the internet, I could reach an audience of thousands, and eventually millions – for free. And somehow it turned into a career. I was able to bring in enough advertising revenue to cover my salary, and even bring on other writers. But I’ve always been so busy handling the business/webmastering side of Universe Today that I’ve never taken the time to go to Florida and report on a rocket launch for myself.
Well, that’s about to change. On April 29th, 2011, the space shuttle Endeavour is going to blast off for the last time, delivering the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and an ExPRESS Logistics Carrier to the International Space Station. And I’m going to be covering the story, live, from the Kennedy Space Center, together with Jason and Ken.
This mission has a personal angle as well. It was just over 30 years ago, on April 12th, 1981 when the space shuttle launched for the first time – STS-1. My father was always a fan of space exploration, and he woke me up early that morning so we could watch the launch of Columbia together on our tiny black-and-white television. I remember that day vividly, and it was one of the turning points of my life. I can trace my entire career in space journalism right back to that April morning.
I’ve always put off making the epic journey from Vancouver Island to Cape Canaveral, but I just couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to do this one personally. See you in Florida.
As you probably noticed, Universe Today was unavailable for the last couple of days. The site is hosted with Amazon.com’s EC2 service, which has been very stable up until now. But the entire East Coast data center failed early Thursday morning, taking out hundreds of thousands of websites (including Universe Today). This has been a PR disaster for Amazon, so I’m assuming they’re going to go out of their way to make sure it never, ever happens again. Obviously, I’m also going to be making better contingency plans as well.
Sorry for the disruption, let’s hope everything’s stable from this point on.