A change of template

We’ve changed the template here. It’s based on the Twenty Thirteen theme that will launch with the next version of WordPress. It means I can make some other changes to the site.

Get more FREE papers

Well not exactly. What I’ve already done is change the search engine. It now sorts posts by relevance and you’re welcome to give it a go. It pulls up more old posts. These could be very relevant, not least because Annals of Botany makes its papers free to access a year after publication. Before the site would automatically pull a DOI from a post and make a button saying Get the Paper. Now if you can get the paper free, it should tell you. Papers from AoB PLANTS, which are always Open Access, should get different highlighting. If we’re offering a paper free you should have a much better chance of seeing that.

More links

I’ve pulled the Other Botany Blogs widget from the right. Few posts were getting clicked on. Instead the site has changed the way it handles links. What should happen now is that some posts appearing on site (and in your feed too if I can fix that) will simply be direct links to other posts. If I’m going to link to the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog posting about Ancient American agrobiodiversity podcasts then I may as well link directly there instead of putting a post here that you then click through to there. I suppose I could just link directly to the podcasts myself, but that’s not polite.

More mobile accessibility

The site is responsive, which is a buzzword at the moment. In English it means you should get a version of the site you can read on a desktop, laptop, tablet or phone. The narrower your screen is, the more things get shuffled round. There’s various options at the right, but they get shunted to the bottom of the screen on a narrow screen. If you want to play with that you can narrow the window if you’re using a desktop or laptop machine.

Maybe some bad ideas

We’ll be experimenting with other ideas over the coming months. Obviously we hope that they’ll all be successful but that’s not likely. For example we anticipate putting out more bilingual posts, but we have identified a few ways we can do that better. Not all mistakes are obvious though so you’re always welcome to leave comments if you think something can be improved.

And the magazine cover was made with the Pulp-O-Mizer. Alas my Trees for Tomorrow T-shirt didn’t arrive in time for the meeting we had on Tuesday, so that’ll have to wait till the future.