Monday, January 15, 2018

New lab website, a Reddit experience and the Strogatz effect...

Now that things are starting to settle down after my move, writing up thesis, doing oral boards, setting up new practice: most of the BIG things are done. The nice part about this is that I have been able to start thinking about the LITTLE things - little things which often matter a lot, but necessarily fall lower on the hierarchy of needs than the BIG things.

On this list has always been to set up a lab web site, which is finally done.  Thanks in no small part to a post-doc who's working with me, Inom Mirzaev, and Mike Baym (a twitter buddy who's html code I stole to use as boilerplate). Anywho, it's live and you can see it here - I'd love feedback... just leave in comments or email me...

We did a bunch of (what I think are) cool things, one of which was to embed an altmetric badge on the site next to each publication. This was SUPER easy, and looks pretty nice, I think.  You can find info on how to do it here (I don't speak html, and it was really easy), and you get this nice effect:


Which is the article I wrote the 'story behind the paper' for the last post.  And, holy crap that is by far my highest Altmetric score (the Strogatz effect - in addition to it being a lasting piece of high quality work)... and it brings me to the final part of the title, my first Reddit experience.  eLife (great journal, great publishing experience... more on that later) has a running relationship with Reddit, and they asked Steve to do an AMA (an 'Ask Me Anything') about this paper. 

Murray (the dog) didn't show up, but we did have a spirited discussion with a bunch of folks asking questions about the paper, and about life in general. It was my first time on Reddit in any capacity, so I just chimed in when I thought it was appropriate, and I think a good time was had by all. Not sure how it works, but I might try to host an AMA about #mathonco or #mathevo next time we have a paper out. Let's see if +Artem Kaznatcheev or +Dan Nichol 's papers are first (ooh - or actually I'd bet Nara's is...)