The Half Decent Pharmaceutical Chemistry Blog

Keeping myself busy in this period is certainly an excellent thing. Pretty easy, too. Just to start, I’ve edited the “Coming Soon” of the Euchromatic Blog, upgrading it: in a nutshell, I can already tell you that the web-site will be optimised for 1440x900 resolutions, given that both my new monitor at home and my future laptop will use it.

Putting “Memories, feelings, emotions” into my posts is something that I had already decided to do long before the decease of my grandmother: I believe the overall tone of this blog has been too similar to someone trying to lecture an audience rather than amuse it. That was largely because I saw this blog as a functional tool for studying, but because I’m tasting what to be a graduate student means, I can already foresee I’ll write as a way of unwinding and, therefore, many posts will cover being (some sort of) a scientist rather than scientific topics full stop. Even if I guess I’ve already started to do that, haven’t I?

I’ve created a new category for my future posts, “The Euchromatic Blog”, where to put everything related to the new blog. Today, for example, I feel the need to explain why, despite me being a co-owner of ChemBlogs, I have felt the need to register a web domain and use Wordpress.

First, Mitch, who actually had the idea of ChemBlogs as a platform for chemists willing to blog about their interests, has decided to close down the website as, well, I’m the only one who started a blog here (I wasn’t even that enthusiast about it) and has actually kept writing on it regularly. I could have gone solo and become the only owner of ChemBlogs, but I frankly can’t see the point of a (mainly) molecular biology blog, with the prefix chem- in the address line.
Moreover, nearly all the successful scientific blogs have their own, simple, address and domain.

The main reason for changing, though, has to do with spam. Yesterday I had been busy doing a Western blot, looking after cells and bacteria. Oh, and I also did one of things I like the most about molecular biology: a massive digestion with two different restriction enzymes, followed by a brief run on a highly resolving agarose gel.

Anyway, I could hardly check my inbox(es) every now and then, and certainly couldn’t check the comments to the blog I had to moderate. When I checked this today (after less than 24 hours) I counted 163 comments to moderate. As you can see, all of them have been cancelled because it was all spam. Today being Labour Day (or May Day: Wikipedia hasn’t helped me understand the difference), I have decided I have had enough of it: I’ve got better things to do than reading an endless list of spam messages.

This, though, doesn’t mean meaningful comments are not to be displayed after a while as usual: I just want to apologize for all the times your comments might be lost, simply deleted with the torrential flood of rubbish I receive.
You see, I believe both me and you don’t like this feature of my blog: you don’t immediately see your comment once it’s submitted and I have to dedicate a some time to go through the messages to fish for “real” ones. This badly influences the chances of people actually starting any interesting debate on what I write and, above all, is a bit of nuisance to me. However, of all the anti-spam plugins provided by LifeType, which powers this blog, this proved to be only reliable one, unless one doesn’t mind having tons of spam displayed among the comments to serious articles. Or needs to buy cialis or viagra or diazepam.

Wordpress has better systems of tackling the issue (I’ve tried them with another “draft” blog I’ve set up to work at the layout of the Euchromatic Blog) and many more toys to play with (perhaps even too many).