Welcome to the new installation of ResearchBuzz, now running WordPress instead of Movable Type. I moved to WP for a variety of reasons, most of which involved ease of use, the huge number of plugins and possibilities, and because my Web host enthusiastically supports it.

I have spent the past week researching and installing plug-ins, goofing with templates, etc. That’s why there hasn’t been any actual, you know, NEWS on ResearchBuzz. However I think you’ll like some of the things that will become available on the new installation:

1. Easy social site bookmarking — it’s now easy to digg or My Yahoo or Del any of the entries you want to.

2. More screen shots — Those of you who read WRAL Tech Talk know that I use a lot of screen shots there. I’ve gotten a Flickr account just for ResearchBuzz that will include more screenshots and relevant pix.

3. Built-in glossary. THE number one feature request I have gotten for ResearchBuzz is to explain the wide variety of acronyms I use, new words, etc. ResearchBuzz has a wide variety of users at a wide variety of different levels in their online experience, and I forget that. I have installed a WordPress plugin that’ll allow me to define words with little bubble-up tooltips. Put your mouse over this word: RSS . Isn’t that neat? Though you may have to remind me when a word needs defining.

4. Breadcrumb Navigation — I also installed a plugin that’ll provide breadcrumb navigation at the bottom of individual posts. I’m still contemplating how to do standard back/forth navigation on the site — the template code doesn’t appear to work.

What happened to the old ResearchBuzz site? Oh, it’s still there. I’ll be integrating it slowly, instead of just importing the entries, so I can fix 404 errors as I go. Yes, it will take some time, but I have so many incoming links I don’t want to mess them up. The RSS feed remains the same, too, since I’m using FeedBurner for that.

Plans on Deck

1. Give ResearchBuzz tools — Kebberfegg, Cooking with Google, SearchRoller, etc — their own pages instead of mushing them in with the blog entries. Yes, I KNOW Cooking with Google is broken. It’s either going to get fixed or turned into Cooking with Yahoo.

2. Category-based RSS feeds — I have a written set of standards for establishing categories, which I want to tighten up. I’ll then get into generating category-based RSS feeds for those of you who care about genealogy but nothing else, etc. (This is dependent on another decision I have to make, which I’ll get into below.)

3. Move and update all the static pages — about, submitting a site, etc.

Things I’m Considering

There are several things I’m considering but haven’t decided on yet. Feedback is appreciated.

1. Tags — If I could do tags and easily generate RSS feeds based on tags, I’d do it, but I don’t know how possible that is. Getting deeply into tags will probably mean abandoning categories.

2. WAP Access — If there’s interest I could make ResearchBuzz WAP accessible.

3. Translation — There are plugins for creating easily-translatable pages, if there’s interest in that.

4. ??? — Anything else that I missed? Feature requests? “Update more often?” Yes, that’s on my feature request list too. Fortunately a lot of heavy lifting is now out of the way.

Thanks so much for your patience. I really want to make ResearchBuzz a useful, usable site. Hopefully the new features and the new look will help. You can always send feedback to misc – at – researchbuzz.com (Obscured to foil nasty spam harvesters.) Thanks for reading!