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Space Feeds has moved
Space Feeds got to be too big for one page - so, now it is six pages. Just click on one of the links in the navigation bar above. Labels: meta
blogging vacation
I know that there hasn't been much activity on this blog in a while; I'm working some fairly long hours and haven't made the time for the blog. So, I'm going to take a vacation from posting the space video of the day, and will return in mid-September. When I do return, there will be some big changes to this site. Update: the aforementioned big changes are taking longer than I thought they would; the space video of the day will return at the end of September. Labels: meta
50 and 250
The 50th edition of the Carnival of Space is up at KySAT. I just added KySAT - a group in Kentucky which is helping Kentucky students to launch a CubeSat later this year - to the Space Blogroll. A few days ago I realized that due to the space videos of the day Space Feeds is now a space blog (smcks forehead) and added it too. I also changed one entry, updating David S.F. Portree's entry to point to his new blog, Altair VI. And I finally got around to adding Parabolic Arc to the blogroll as well. With the recent additions, the Space Blogroll has hit a milestone: there are now 250 blogs on the Space Blogroll (yay for us!). I hope to see another 250 added within the next few years. Labels: meta
add Space Feeds to your blog
Yesterday I promised that I would post the necessary code to add various elements of this page to your own blog or website. You may modify any of this code to suit your site's color scheme, available sidebar footprint, and so on in whatever way suits you, with one exception that I will explain below.
First of all, near the top of my sidebar is a button that pops up the Astronomy Media Player. The AMP is a collection of space-related podcasts aggregated together into one convenient player. Here's the code:
Next, if you want to install the Space and Astronomy Search Engine, use this:
Next we have the various news and blog feeds. First up is the Space Show with Dr. David Livingston. This is the one exception that I referred to above. You may modify this code in any way you wish, but I ask that you leave a link to The Space Show at the top.
Space Blog Feeds:
Space News Feeds:
More space feeds via Google Blogsearch:
Digg space feeds:
Weekly space news feeds: For this, you are probably best off simply subscribing to the news feed, which will be delivered to your email inbox.
Next, there are three space comics. The first two are fairly straightforward, and for the third I had to write a bit of javascript code. Before including any of these comics on your site, you might want to get permission from the artists, as I did.
Station V3:
Rockwood:
Schlock Mercenary:
Of the lists of links in the Big List O' Space Links, only the Space Blogroll has conveniently short code. Instructions for adding this blogroll to your blog, or for joining the blogroll yourself, may be found here.
Here's the code for the image feeds. I have no control over the size of the image displayed, and sometimes APOD's image is wider than the screen. If someone figures out how to set the size of the displayed image, let me know.
NASA image of the day:
Astronomy Picture of the Day:
Finally, if you just want to put a button in your sidebar, add the following code to your blog template:
Labels: meta
A long-overdue update
Work has kept me fairly busy over the last several months, and I haven't had a chance to update this website as often as I would like. Over the last few days I have finally gotten around to fixing things up around here. The first thing that longtime visitors will notice is that the site loads much faster now; I got rid of Astronomy Buzz and the image gallery at the bottom of the page, as these two elements were taking longer to load than the rest of the page combined, and were really not adding all that much value to the site. Secondly, in the Search section below I added a tag cloud for the Space Video of the Day. I had been building up tags in del.icio.us ever since I started doing the Space Video of the Day last summer, so this little bit of extra functionality should help a lot for those who are searching for specific space videos. One thing that I have neglected horribly over these past few months has been the Space Blogroll. With each new Carnival of Space that has come out I have found new space bloggers, but I just didn't get around to updating the blogroll, and just kept getting further and further behind. The new blogs on the Space Blogroll, most of which were added just today, are Blackholes and Astrostuff, Deep Sky Blog, The Belt of Venus, Space Age Archaeology, New Voyage News, LunarIP, New Frontiers, Astronomy a Go Go!, Astronomy Down Under, Alien Life, Res Communis, Cosmology Curiosity, Astrowatcher, Midnight Mars Browser, Homeboy's Astronomy Blog, Sydney Observatory, webjones, NASA Orion Spaceship Blog, Professor Astronomy, Rick's Astronomy Journal, Livejournal Astronomy Community, First Light, Women in Planetary Science, Personal Spaceflight, Martian Chronicles, astroengine, ghostNASA, Riding with Robots on the High Frontier, On Orbit, Starts With A Bang!, GRBlog, Gravity Loss, Free Space, Rocketeers, Breaking News for sky afficionados , Visual Astronomy, Political Action for Space, and Red N Blue Observatory. There are now 247 blogs on the Space Blogroll. If you are a space blogger and your blog does not yet appear on the blogroll, then you might want to check out this link. Almost all of these blogs have RSS feeds, so their blog entries now also appear in the Space Blog Feeds below; a total of 191 space blogs are represented in those feeds, but only the 20 most recent blog entries are listed, so check back often. This was actually the most time-consuming part of the update to Space Feeds, as the feeds are aggregated through Google Reader, which takes an inconveniently-long time to perform even the most trivial of operations; adding a single feed can take upwards of five minutes, approximately 50 times longer than it takes to add a feed in an aggregator like Bloglines. The only advantage I get with using Google Reader is that the entire group of feeds is aggregated into a single feed, which can then be displayed using the Grazr widget. There have also been quite a few additions to the other sections of the Big List O' Space Links. I added Shoestring Astronomy, A Walk On Mars, Space Animation and SpaceCAD to Images, Models and Simulations; Space Colony One, American Astronautical Society and The Space Foundation to Associations and Interest Groups; Federation of Galactic Explorers, Space Cable, Astronomy Boy and the website for the Orphans of Apollo documentary to Education and Reference; Speed UP, Wickman Spacecraft and Propulsion and Telespazio to Space Businesses; and Jonathan's Space Report and The Cosmic Mirror to Space News. Including the new space blogs and my other additions, the Big List O' Space Links now contains 625 links. I obviously don't have time to check through all of those links on a regular basis to see if the websites are still active, so if you come upon a dead blog or defunct website or incorrect URL in the Big List, please let me know in the comments and I'll try to fix it as soon as possible. I'm not completely done with this update just yet. I will soon be changing the Space Fiction link category to Fiction and Games, and adding a fairly large number of links to that category; there are rather a lot of space-themed games online, and it will take me some time to sort through them. Finally, I have decided to give away a lot of the code that is on this page. For instance, suppose that you only want to read the latest Space News, but don't particularly much care about the rest of the stuff on this page. On my next blog post I will be publishing the code for many of the elements of this page, and if you want to post them on your own blog or website you will only need to copy and paste a short snippet of code to your site. Labels: meta
coming soon: Space Video of the Day
Over on my Robot Guy blog I have been posting sorta-daily space videos for about the last six months or so. Starting tomorrow those videos will be posted here instead. Also, I know that it has been a long time since I updated this page, and an update is sorely needed. So, sometime over the next few days I'll be adding some blogs to the Space Blogroll, adding a few more links, changing some things around a little bit, and pretty much just increasing the functionality of the page. There are also a few other things on my wish-list for Space Feeds that aren't quite ready yet, but hopefully I'll be able to incorporate them as they become available. Labels: meta
September Update
OK, it has been a while since I gave an update on this page. Over the last few months, I have made some minor tweaks, which hopefully will make the page load a litle faster. Today I also added a whole bunch of links. First off, I added nine more blogs to the Space Blogroll: Monsters in the Sky, Advanced Nanotechnology, The Discovery Enterprise, Cumbrian Sky, Out of the Blue, Into the Black, Ex Astris Scientia, Frontier Spaceport, The Visible Universe, and Space Solar Power. This brings the total number of blogs on the Space Blogroll to 199. Also, for those who haven't yet heard, Matt Bowes of Space Liberates Us has unfortunately passed on. His blog will remain on the space blogroll, however, so that people can still easily find the things that he wrote in his (too short) time with us; his words will live on. I also added more links to the Big List O' Space Links. New on the Space Associations and Interest Groups list are Google Lunar X-Prize, 62 mile club, Yuri's Night, East Antrim Astronomical Society, Sidewalk Astronomers, and NewMars. New on the Space Business list are BonNova and EADS Astrium. New Images, Models, and Simulations pages are Explore Mars, Atlas of the Universe, IOTA, Galaxy Crash, Google Moon, and Launch Photography. Finally, I added Polecat Aerospace to Amateur Rocketry, Star Trek: New Voyages to Space Fiction and Shuttle Source to Space News. Finally, over the last few months I have added links near the top of the page and in the sidebar to Galaxy Zoo, Seti@Home, Space Weather, and SpaceflightNow's worldwide launch schedule. Including all the space blogs and other links, there are now 570 links on this page, enough to keep even the most hard-core space nut busy. One final feature that is sure to please: the feeds from the Space Show, space blogs, and space news are all Grazr widgets. If you want to put any of these three widgets on your own blog, all you have to do is click on the + sign at the top of the desired widget, and you will be taken to Grazr, where you can customize the widget to match your blog's color scheme (along with a number of other adjustable parameters). Then just copy and paste some code, and you have those feeds displayed on your own blog. Thanks to InterplanetSarah for showing me how it is done. Labels: meta
a subtle change
For months now this site has displayed the titles of the newest 50 space blog entries and newest 50 space news items - but only the titles. I have changed that section so that if you click on the title in an item, the description will come up on this page. Clicking on the title a second time will collapse the description. Depending on how individual webmasters have set up their sites, the description might be as few as 200 characters, but in some cases it will show the entire item. Included at the end of each title is a >> symbol; clicking on that symbol will open up the item in a new page. The tradeoff here is that rather than showing 50 items for each list, there are now only 20 items. I figured this tradeoff was worth it though, due to the increased functionality of the page. Labels: meta
Monthly Site Update - May
Update to the update: I noticed a slight problem in the display of the Microcom weekly space news feed in IE6; that is fixed now, and the site should now work on all browsers.Well, it is a few days late, but I finally got around to updating the site. The first change you'll notice is a new button in the sidebar, connecting to NASA's CoLab project. I had wanted to include this in the big list of space links at the bottom of the page, but I just couldn't make it fit into one of my categories. I thought that this was an important project though, and that it should be easily reached from here, and so into the sidebar it goes. The next change is about midway down the page. I have recently started experimenting with widgets, and I found some really good ones. One of them lists the most recent podcasts from The Space Show with Dr. David Livingston; clicking on a podcast title there will bring up a description, and you can even listen to the podcast right from this page. Another widget scours Flickr for the 30 newest astronomy images, which cycle in a slideshow about every eight seconds or so. And I found Phil Plait's Astronomy Buzz, which is now embedded right beside the Flickr slideshow. I have also added some more links to The Big List O' Space Links: StarLight Learning and the delightful Space Geek (whoops... link fixed) to Education and Reference; Astro Shorts, NASA Image of the Day and Sloan Digital Sky Survey to Images, Models, and Simulations; SkyMania News, Dawn's Early Light, and SOHO Space Weather to Space News; and finally Space Buffs to Associations and Interest Groups. There are now 528 links on the Big List, and growing. You may also notice that I have prettied things up a little bit, having added new title graphics to all the categories in the Big List and squashing the entire page a little bit horizontally to give a little whitespace on the sides. As always, if you know of any space-, astronomy-, or rocketry-related links that I am missing, please let me know in the comments and I'll get right on adding those links. I haven't finalized this page by a long shot - I know that I want to that NASA Image of the Day to display right here on this page, probably just above or below APOD. Hopefully I'll get that included later this month. Labels: blog, links, meta
Monthly Site Update - April
Well, the first of the month has come and gone, and so it is time for what looks to be a monthly site update. Today I added a bunch of links to the Big List Of Space Links, namely adding Celestis, Paragon Labs, Stone Aerospace, AstroExpo, Universal Space Systems, and Venture Space Van Nuys to Businesses; Rockets Away! Media to News; BANG! Universe, Space DEW, and Buran-Energia Project to Education and Reference; 88 largest solar system bodies, This is Rocket Science!, WikiSky, Space Model Systems, and Sky-High Gallery to Images, Models, and Simulations; Upscale Rocketry to Amateur Rocketry; and New Mexico Space Industry and The Moon Society to Associations and Interest Groups. Labels: blog, links, meta
Tweak, Tweak
I have noticed that the feed from Astronomy Picture of the Day sometimes takes a very long time to load onto this page - so long, in fact, that those who aren't regular visitors here might not ever see the lower half of the page. So, I moved APOD down to the very bottom of the page. I also recently found some more links, and today added European Southern Observatory, Friends of the Observatory, Gemini Observatory, and Griffith Observatory to the Images, Models, and Simulations list in the Big List O' Links. Labels: apod, links, meta
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