Blog4Brains Version 1.3 Now Released!
We are proud to announce the newest version of B4B. We have been constantly working to improve your enjoyment of this community site. This new version adds more functionality, more entertainment, more interaction and more visual appeal.
We have added a left sidebar containing RSS feeds from our favorite sites — The Onion, Media Matters, Newsvine, NewScientist and Associated Press. We have also added ‘Cerebral’s Top 5…’ [Coming Very Soon] which will be my top five books, movies, music and magazines all organized into different categories (science, political, foreign, etc…). And for the left sidebar, we have also added a donations “widget” which allows anyone to make a small, or large, donation to Blog4Brains to help continue this passionate project of ours.
With this new version we are also adding another type of article that will be hitting our front page. It is called a “Notable”. As we, the editors, surf around the internet nearly 24/7, we come across some great articles, and instead of us just bookmarking them to our own computers, we will be posting some of the “notable” ones to share with you, our loyal readers.
All “Notable Articles” will be branded with our Notability Award (image at right). We will write a small summary of the article, then supply a link/button at the bottom so you can visit the article of interest. Then come back when you done to discuss the content of the article with our other readers.
Lastly, we have added a couple of new categories (Thought Experiments, Cartoons, Health Alerts and Notable Articles), more visual interest to articles, better quality photographs and more. We hope you enjoy this new version, continue your highly valued loyalty and never stop adding your intellectual voice to our wonderful community. Now, please explore our new site, and don’t forget to come back here and give us your best ideas, criticisms, comments and noticed errors.
3 Comments so far
Leave a reply
New Scientist
The Onion
Media Matters
Newsvine
Associated Press
Congrats. Is this a beta version or the real thing? Just kidding.
A suggestion to NOT excell. It is only too common when one is working on one’s own enterprise to strive and strive to make it better. This can be done to death — the death of one’s own enterprise.
“Oh wouldn’t it be great to enhance the photos with better resolution? Wouldn’t it be great to hire an excellent web designer to fluff up the pages? Wouldn’t it be great to download articles to ipods? Wouldn’t…wouldn’t…wouldn’t…. The road to improvement never ends.
Just as things are, there’s now a small profit. Let’s use it to… Wrong! One must first show a substantial profit from the enterprise before upgrading. Upgrading drailns profits, if any, and saps work time and personal energy.
What I am saying to Blog4Brains is to SLOW DOWN. And pace yourself financially. This is meant to be taken as a suggestion.
Hey Stan, thanks for the suggestion, and you are right about the always trying to be perfect belief. I have actually made that mistake before. Fortunately, everything about this website’s management is done by little old me. The only real expense is my time, and since I don’t have a “real” job, I have quite a bit of it.
The only thing we actually pay for is the photos, because stealing is not ethical, and hosting because the site needs to exist somewhere. Other than that, we do it because we are passionate about it and would love to turn this into a viable business.
I can’t see too much change from here on out, until I can integrate this site, which is Wordpress, into Joomla, which is a more powerful web program that can handle an actual community and many individual authors. The final version of this site, at least how I envision it, is for all kinds of people to be able to author their own articles, submit their own “Notables” and comment on each others “writings”. I want to create an online community that is focused on the conversation. Newsvine is probably the closest thing I can compare it to.
But, this will take me a while to build, so for a while, this will be Blog4Brains. Anyways, thanks for your commitment to our site and your valuable loyalty for all these months. You are a great patron, and we hope you will stay for more months to come. Take care Stan.