Long time…

It’s been a pretty hectic few months. Back in January, I successfully defended my thesis and finished up my doctorate at BCM. After a brief celebration, we packed up and moved back to St. Louis, where I’m now working as a staff scientist at the Washington University Genome Center. We’ll miss some of our good friends in Houston, but are excited about moving on. Now that we’re more or less settled into our place down in Soulard, I’ll get back to posting sporadic updates, both here and over on my science blog.

Announcing BioBits

Lately, I’ve been struggling with the fact that I’ve been writing for two different audiences on my weblog. The first group consists of my family, friends, and people that have similar tastes in politics and culture. The second group are fellow scientists and techies who may be interested in what I’ve been up to in lab, or what new bioinformatics tools I’ve been using.

In the interest of pleasing both audiences and allowing you to more easily sort the wheat from the chaff, I’m moving my science writing to chrisamiller.com/science while maintaining my personal blog right here. I want to emphasize that this isn’t about separating my personal and professional lives, as that’s a near impossibility in this age of the internet. Rather, it’s about offering focused content to just the people that want to hear it.

I’m also making a resolution to post on a near-daily basis over there, to get that site off on the right foot. Some days it may just be a code snippet, or a good quotation, but I’ll try to keep the content flowing with some more meaty posts about bioinformatics, article reviews, and thoughts about scientific culture.

Meta

1) I fixed the linkdump script again, so updates should be trickling in every few days, instead of a month at a time (as you see below).

2) I’ve updated my landing page to a design I’m much happier with. If you’re using IE, you’ll see the page sans rounded corners and may encounter other quirks. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. Get a real browser that supports web standards, like Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.

October

It’s October again – that must mean it’s time for playoff baseball, featuring my hometown St. Louis Cardinals. As is tradition around these parts, I’ve changed the masthead accordingly.

I had the good fortune to see them stomp the Astros 11-3 a few weeks ago. Here’s hoping for similarly lopsided scores as they go for another World Series ring.

What does a mama bear on the pill have in common with the World Series? No cubs. –Harry Caray

Pardon the Mess

I’ll be switching hosting providers sometime in the next few days, so the site may be down for a bit.

If this happens, don’t despair – think of it as an opportunity. Go outside and enjoy the weather. Read a book. Take your wife out for a nice dinner. Spend some time with your children.

And when you’ve done all that, check back here and things should be up and running again.

Meta

Today I was at home, sick and too drugged up to work, so I figured I’d cross a few items off of my to-do list:

1) Created a new landing page at chrisamiller.com, with links to some of my activity around the web.
2) Updated my CV and posted it at chrisamiller.com/cv

No, I’m not job-shopping yet – I still have some time to put in on the PhD – but it never hurts to have the old resume up-to-date. The CV is still missing a few items, but I’m fairly happy with how both pages turned out. Comments and criticism are welcome.

Five years

Last Friday marked five years since I started this weblog.

I thought about doing a big introspective look back at old posts, but digging through the archives just didn’t feel like much fun today.

Instead, I’ll just say that a lot has changed in my life since then. I’ve finished up college, moved across the country, and gotten married. My politics haven’t changed much, but I’m generally less hot-headed and a little more accepting of the fact that changing society is a slow process. I’m a lot more focused and sure of my goals in life, and a lot happier with my current position.

So, internet, here’s to another five.

2008 recap

A few of the things I did this year:

All in all, a pretty good year. Here’s to an even better 2009.

Blog 2.0

Actually, it’s probably the 3rd or 4th major revamping of this site. Visually, this upgrade is a little more subtle, but behind the scenes there have have been some major overhauls. A few of the notable differences:

Content Engine: The biggest change is that I switched from Movable Type to WordPress. Honestly, both have all the functionality I need, but my webhost (1and1) sets very low timeouts on scripts, which means that MT’s rebuilding process often died while trying to crunch it’s way through the archives of the site. I hear that the next generation of MT will be sleeker and faster, but I got tired of waiting. WordPress seems to be working well so far, and the migration wasn’t too difficult.

Visual Upgrades: You’ll probably notice the wider margins, along with some minor (and ongoing) tweaks to the style of the site. If time permits, I’m going to overhaul the layout even more, but I’ll leave it here for tonight. There are a ton of web designers whose work influences my ideas, notably Kottke, Matt Haughey, and the old stylings of SimpleBits. Unfortunately, I never seem to have the time to put most of those ideas in place. C’est la vie.

Twitter Integration: I’ve started using Twitter to do microblogging, and those posts will be appearing here on the site (probably in a daily-digest form). It’s a nice way to shoot off quick one-liners as I think of things throughout the day. I’m using Twitter Tools, with a few PHP hacks that I threw in to make it work the way I wanted.

Please let me know if you find anything broken (chris at ‘this domain’). More technical stuff under the fold.

(more…)

MT 4.0

Just upgraded, this is a test post.

Update: Surprisingly smooth upgrade. Nice work, SixApart!

RIP, Linkblog

Following Kottke’s lead, I decided that having a separate linkblog in the sidebar is probably a bad idea. Practically, it means that most people miss the cool stuff I’m posting that day.

So as much as I loved Tumblr’s quickpost interface, it’s back to MT bookmarklets for now. I’ll look into installing MT4 soon, which supposedly has some nice features. At this point in the week though, sleep and science are taking priority over everything else. I even forgot to eat lunch today.

Overload

I know that half of my posting these days seems to be about grad school and science, but I suppose that’s what a PhD program does to you. Hopefully, I’ll venture back into politics once the primaries get a little bit closer, but right now, I could give a rat’s ass.

Since I rarely have time to make substantial posts anymore, I’ll try to at least pass on a better selection of links to things I’ve read and enjoyed.

Quick (two question) survey

I need to revamp my site a little, so I have two quick questions for you readers. If you read the site regularly, do me a favor and take 30 seconds to take this anonymous survey

I’m beginning to wonder if maintaining my linkblog separately is a mistake. Tumblr has a great bookmarklet for one-click posting of articles, which is why I made the move. It makes it really easy on my end. If no one is reading the stuff, though, I may move that content back into the main site.

(And yes, I know that it’s a pain in the ass to click through twice to get to the articles on the linkblog, and I already plan on fixing that, no matter what I end up doing with the links)

RSS woes

If you’re having trouble viewing this site through RSS, unsubscribe and resubscribe to the blog. It turns out my old RSS feed was linked inappropriately, and when I switched hosting plans, the old link broke.

Google-fame

Apparently, this old post of mine is the number one google hit for “Fundamentalist Propaganda”.

It’s too bad, really. I was expecting it to point here:

Linkblog, Part II

Long story short, my current webhost doesn’t offer access to cron jobs, so I had to upgrade to Movable Type 3.33 in order to get the linkblog feed working correctly. It seems to work great though – you’ll find it to your right in the sidebar.

The plan is to post snippets and fun links over there, and keep more substantial entries here on the main blog. There will probably be more daily activity on the linkblog, so be sure to subscribe to that RSS feed too.

Linkblog

Since most of my posts lately have been links to interesting webfinds, I decided to start a linkblog. You can find it at http://www.chrisamiller.org/.

So far I like the ease of posting that tumblr provides, and if I end up using the linkblog a lot, I’ll integrate it into the main site here.

Testing

The migration is done, and I think everything is back in working order. Report any bugs you encounter to chris at <thisdomain> dot com

Downtime

My hosting plan is expiring, and I’ll be switching servers sometime in the next week. While the migration happens, there may be some downtime on the site. If that happens, check back in a day or two and all should be well.

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