Garrett, Here is an email I sent out just before Thanksgiving announcing I was ready to start accepting content from people.  

James

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Hello $firstname,

The EU Geology - Real Science website is ready to go!  I've worked through 100's of issues, added lots of cool features, changed to a dark theme, and have started entering content.

A critical feature I just got working last week is email.  This email is really an 'article' I posted on the website, it did not come from my personal email account

Do not reply to this email - I haven't figured that part out yet.  Respond to james@ecosleuth.com.  

I really want your input about everything - colors, layout, functionality, content.  I've been working on this by myself and making all the decisions.  I'd like to know what your first impressions are.

Your Login

I've set up an account in your name.  This is a lifetime account with no membership fees.  This gives you the ability to post articles and comments.  I plan to give away 500 free memberships to get things started.  After that it will be a $20/year fee.

To login go to RealScience.Rocks and click on 'Login' in the upper right corner.

Your username is: $username

If I never gave you a password or you forgot it you can reset it $user_reset.

The Plan

What I really need now is for people to submit some articles.  Mark has one on Stone Tornadoes, Tymn added a couple on Velikovsky, and I'm working on one about Earths dynamo.  If you have something you would like to publish please contact me and I'll work with you to get it posted.

I'd like to have 5-10 articles before introducing the site to a larger audience.  I've accumulated over 80 email addresses of interested people both at and since the conference.  I would like to send an introductory email out to these folks over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Space News wants to do two segments in early December - one with Edwin on SAM and one with me on this site.  They are going to reach lots of people.  In addition I know 5 or 6 people with large networks they can introduce the site to.  This should get the site out to another 25,000 people.  I'm sure you folks know of many more ways to get the site out.  My goal is reach over 100,000 people by January first - I think this is totally possible - but we need content for these people to read once they get there.

The name Group has been changed to Community

In the past when I talked about the site I spoke of Groups.  I've renamed Groups to Communities. This name better fits the intent of the site.

Communities/Groups can have members.  These members are assigned roles which give them permissions to do things in the community - view content, publish content, add members, etc.  Members can select to receive emails notifying them when new content has been added to that community.

Books and Articles

I've created two types of content - Articles and Book pages.

Articles are like a News article.  They are good for introducing a new idea, starting a conversation about a topic, reporting a recent event.   Articles need to be self explaining - meaning a new reader can understand the article without a lot of supporting pages.  Users can find articles by applying filters and getting back a list of matching articles.  You can filter by author, topic, community or keyword.   When viewing an article a list of related articles can be displayed in the sidebar.  That'll be coming soon.

Book pages are for more long term explanations.  They are more timeless in nature.  Book pages can be grouped together into a book with a hierarchical menu to navigate them.  Take a look at the EU Geology Book menu in the upper left corner of this page.  The menu is the portion underneath the blue line.  If you are not logged in you'll see one item "Introduction to EU Geology".  

If you are logged in and you have the right permissions (which you should if I did it right), you will see two icons - a book and a thunderbolt.  Clicking the book let's you edit the order and title of the book pages.  Clicking the thunderbolt icon enables/disables the display of unpublished pages.  Showing unpublished pages makes it possible to define an outline for the book by creating a bunch of empty pages.  This breaks the task of writing a book down into manageable tasks.  My goal is to create at least one book page per day.  The pages are color coded:

  • Grey: Placeholder, the page is empty
  • Blue: Draft, work has been started
  • Pink: Needs Review, author wants someone to review the page
  • Green: Published, page will now show up for the normal user.
  • White: Page currently being viewed.

The name Group has been changed to Community

In the past when I talked about the site I spoke of Groups.  I've renamed Groups to Communities. I think it better fits the intent of this site.

In Drupal talk - Groups can have members.  These members are assigned roles which give them permissions to do things in the group - view content, publish content, add members, etc.  Members can (optionally) receive emails notifying them when new content has been added to that group.

Domain name change -- EUGeology.rocks -> RealScience.Rocks

The domain name and site name has been changed from EUGeology.Rocks to RealScience.Rocks.  EUGeology.Rocks is too specific - I want the site to be about many aspects of the EU - Structured Atom Model, Velikovsky, Transmutation of Elements, EU Geology, Biology, Meteorology.

Significant Changes

I've made many changes since the EU conference.  The following lists some of the more significant ones:

  • Simplified Entering new Content - I've put a lot of effort into making the entry of new content easy and intuitive.  My thanks to Mark Spann for being patient with me and helping me find and fix many issues.

  • Added Publishing states - Added the ability to classify an article in one of four states:

    • Placeholder (Grey) - The page is empty but this allows the page to show up in a book menu as an unpublished item.

    • Draft (Blue) - Work is being done on the page.

    • Needs Review (Pink) - The author has requested the page be reviewed before being published.

    • Published - Page is complete and it will now show up in the book menu and recent content listings.

  • Community Book menu - Each community (EU Geology, Standard Atom Model, etc.) has it's own 'book'.
  • Google Map for Images - If your article has several pictures and those pictures have their GPS locations recorded then the program displays an interactive map with markers showing the location of the images.  Images can get the GPS location automatically if your phone is configured to do so - or you can do it manually with a google map.  See Mark's Stone Tornado page for an example.

  • Email - This email was sent from the website, not my email account.   Emails will be critical in notifying users of new content.  For now emails are sent on demand when I want to - I'm working on sending them automatically when new content is posted.  Users will have control over whether they want to receive email.

  • Change from light theme to dark theme - I had several people comment they preferred a dark theme.  That is also my preference.  The switch to a dark theme caused lots of issues but I think I have most of them worked out.  Please tell me what you think.  Do you like it?  Are the colors ok?  Is it readable?  I would really like your opinion, I've been working solo on this with little input.

  • Footnotes - Footnotes can be added inline while typing in the text.  Then when the article is displayed Drupal automatically finds the footnotes and assigns them numbers.  It adds the number to the text as a superscript, and displays the footnotes at the bottom of the page.

  • Topics/Glossary - Words in the text can be marked as glossary words or as topics.  If you hover over the words a popup appears with text defining the words.  Clicking on the words takes you to a page about the glossary term or topic.   I foresee topics pages as getting quite long - for example the Birkeland Currents topic will require a lot of explaining and may require additional pages.  The topics page also displays a sidebar which lists recent articles about that topic.