GeologyRocksGeologyRocks Newsletter: Welcome!
Hello and welcome to the first GeologyRocks newsletter! The aim of these newsletters is to keep people up-to-date with the site and highlight a few aspects of GeologyRocks that you may have missed.
Introduction
Because this is the first newletter, I thought I would take this opportunity to introduce myself and the site. My name is Jon Hill and along with my better half, Katie Davis, we created GeologyRocks some 5 years ago. Katie is an evolutionary palaeobiologist with training in geology, palaeobiology and biology. I'm a scientific software engineer with training in geophysics, high performance computing and geology. We both have (or are currently obtaining) PhDs, so unlike many of the sites on the World Wide Web, we do have some expertise The mission of GeologyRocks is very simple: to promote the Earth Sciences. We aim to do that by creating an online, peer-reviewed, community-written, free-to-use textbook. You may notice 'community-written' in that last sentence. GeologyRocks would not be where it is today without the members of the site who contribute in ways too numerous to mention individually.
New version
GeologyRocks 3 is now up and running. The latest incarnation of the site has a whole host of new features. The most prominent of these features are the new user blogs and the ability of any member to easily add content to the site. These features are covered below. The site took around four months to develop and was created using a Content Management System (CMS) called drupal. This is a major improvement over the previous site as all the site content can be administered centrally and responsibilities devolved. This is the first step in creating what I hope will become a large online geological community. We are aware there are some problems with the site and we are endeavouring to fix these. We always welcome your input on anything to do with the site; so don't be shy and contact us.
New content
Well, given this is the first newsletter all the content is technically new, so instead of listing all the content on the site, I'm going to take this opportunity to give you some statistics on our content. As of Friday the 9th of March at 1pm, our content lists as:
- 24 tutorials
- 169 images (137 photo and 32 diagrams)
- 2 articles
- 177 word definitions in the glossary
- A lots of forum topics!
- 19 blog posts
- A lot of comments on all the material
We realise that keeping track of all this material is not easy, so we'll cover the different ways you can do that in the next newsletter issue.
New features
As mentioned above, the new version of the site contains many new features. Two of the most prominent are the new blogs and the 'Add content' feature. I want to cover these in more detail in this issue.
Blogs
Blogs are essentially online diaries. They are a date ordered version of peoples posts. GeologyRocks blogs can be on any subject (as long as it's tasteful, no swearing, no racist comments, etc, etc) and we encourage everyone to use them. To access your own blog, simply go to the "My Blog" link at the top of the homepage. To see other peoples blogs, you currently have to either go to /blog and click a blog post of that person or type in their blog URL, i.e. my blog is at /blog/2 as I'm user number 2. This will change in the near future as we plan to make the blogs much more accessible. We plan to put a link to a users blog from their profile and on other posts they make around the site (if they have a blog of course!).
Each blog post can be "tagged" with keywords relating to that post. These tags are then put in the "tag cloud" found on the blog section of the site. The large the tag is in the cloud, the more frequently it is used. Currently, the tag cloud is site-wide. We plan to implement a per-blog cloud and a site-wide one to help people find the information they are after.
In addition, each blog post can be commented on by other members of the site. Again, this is keenly encouraged.
So to get blogging, visit the "My Blog" link at the top of every page!
Adding Content
Adding content to the old GeologyRocks was a laborious process.You would email your picture, tutorial or glossary entry to the site and I would then spend hours adding it to the database. Well no more! You can now add content directly to the site. Simply click "create content" from either the top of a page or in your personal menu (both of which are available on any page). Then click your content type, and fill in the form. You do not have to finish the whole page at once, just submit your work and add a message to the log message box, stating that this is work in progress. When a page is submitted (either complete or not), no-one can see the page apart from you, the author, and the site editors (Katie and myself). Katie or myself will publish your content when everyone involved is happy with it. It really is that simple! The editors will assign a useful URL to the content, and ensure the content is correctly categorised, etc.
So what do you get out of adding content? Well apart from the warm fuzzy feeling you get from telling the world about your love of geology, you get extra points. Points on GeologyRocks do mean prizes. See /points_and_ranks for more details. In addition, on any pages you create, 50% of the adverts displayed will be yours (you get paid when folks click them). To get your hands on the cash, go here: /help and click on the big button that tells you to sign up for Google adsense. Once you have your ID, fill it in on your profile ("my account") and that's it. Google handle paying you, etc. All GeologyRocks does is add your adsense ID to 50% of the adverts on your pages. If people click it: you get the money.
Finally...
Well that's about it for this issue of the newsletter. As promised in the "Future Plans" document for GeologyRocks, we aim to send out a newsletter at least once every two months. Please let us know if there is anything you would like to see covered or if you'd like a stab at writing one. So for now, so long!