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Beside the fact that I would like to see more posts in our Mathematica Stack Exchange Blog, I have serious concerns that the majority of the people here is able to find it at all.

There seems to be no direct link from the main site to our blog. I mean, we have on the main site direct links to Users, Badges, etc, and I even see a (temporary) link to another blog:

enter image description here

What I couldn't find is a direct way to navigate to our own blog. I had to exhume the old meta post of Szabolcs, where he gave the link.

Is our own blog really that badly integrated into our site? How could anyone of the new people possibly find it?

  • It is in the Stack Exchange dropdown menu, right next to the link that takes you to chat... and you're often in chat ;) If there's a new blog post, our blog will also appear there. – rm -rf♦ Mar 18 '14 at 5:14
  • @rm Oh man, that was wasted time.. Thanks. I'll leave this question, in case someone else is as dump as me. – halirutan♦ Mar 18 '14 at 5:16
  • What bugs me is that once you arrive at the blog, there is no button to return back to Mathematica.SE. You have to use your browser's Previous Page command or a bookmark to return. This may be a trivial flaw, but I find it annoying. – m_goldberg Mar 19 '14 at 0:13
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    As to the more general questions you raise: 1) I do think it would be good to raise awareness of the blog and 2) I very much wish there were more articles posted. – m_goldberg Mar 19 '14 at 0:20
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    As a new user I have to say that I a struggle with current web UI idioms. On mouseover of the StackExchange menu in TL it said "A list of all... Stack Exchange sites" and it didn't occur to me that things related to this site (e.g. Chat, Blog) might be in there. It was only when a mod said I should ask certain questions in Chat that I knew it existed and then had to look for it. Of course, not everything can be shown all the time but if there is a strong relationship to the site then I believe the link should be prominent in the header. Yes, the blog should be more prominently integrated IMO – Julian Moore Mar 19 '14 at 8:59
  • @JulianMoore The Stack Exchange bar at the top is not old in its current form and there have been many discussion about it. Many people don't like it and would prefer the way it was before, but it was a global decision and there is not much we can do about it. I have to say, after a while I finally got used to it (except for the blog link that I missed), but I can fully understand that it is confusing for new users. – halirutan♦ Mar 19 '14 at 9:43
  • @halirutan That's the nature of "progress" I suppose. Just think what it will be like with gesture driven i/fs and everyone just "knows" you have wink at the screen to call up the main menu... for instance :) I think the problem is the "one size fits all" mentality... things should be explicit for beginners and experts should be able to turn off/hide such features... but what do I know! – Julian Moore Mar 19 '14 at 10:04
  • @m_goldberg Re: returning to this site, see the maroon box in the sidebar (on the blog) that says "This is a community blog for Mathematica - Stack Exchange." – rm -rf♦ Mar 22 '14 at 0:24
  • A good idea for the blog would be to convert each well-upvoted answer of the "pitfalls" question as a weekly article (for now, to re-ignite interest) – rm -rf♦ Mar 22 '14 at 0:25
  • @rm-rf. Thanks for pointing this out. I never would have discoverd on my own that the maroon box acted as a return button. – m_goldberg Mar 22 '14 at 2:17
  • @halirutan - Even if easy to find, I didn't realize much was going on there. I wish I had participated in the language survey, for example. Oh, well. Now I know, thanks to your post :-) – Andrew Cheong Mar 26 '14 at 18:14
  • @AndrewCheong No problem. Btw, you have 1.5k rep at BEER.stackexchange.com??? :-) – halirutan♦ Mar 26 '14 at 18:42
  • @halirutan - Yes. Hm... That may have something to do with why I don't know what's going on anywhere. – Andrew Cheong Mar 26 '14 at 18:44
  • @AndrewCheong Another completely unrelated BBW: Since you enjoyed Fahrenheit 451, I highly recommend (although a children's book) The Giver. Additionally, Divergent, of course Hunger Games, most books/stories of Philip Dick and of course Isaac Asimov (there, "Robbie" was one of my favorites). – halirutan♦ Mar 26 '14 at 18:58
  • @halirutan - Thanks! I've added them to my reading spreadsheet; I'll look into them. – Andrew Cheong Mar 26 '14 at 19:01
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OK, I could have sworn it wasn't there 5 minutes ago, but a link to the blog can be found in the Stack Exchange dropdown menu at the top of the page

enter image description here

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    I believe it has been in it's current place since the new tool bar appeared. I've used that menu item to check on the blog a few times this year. – m_goldberg Mar 19 '14 at 0:15
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I'm not completely sure, but I believe new blog posts will appear for a while in the Community Bulletin. Since the last blog post is six months old I'm not terribly surprised it doesn't.

One way to promote the blog, if the community wants to, is to use a Community Promotion Ad to funnel some traffic.

In general, though, a blog with >6 months since its last post won't receive much traffic, though. I would definitely be a casual/frequent visitor of that blog if it had more regular updates!

Edit: I found the official documentation on the community bulletin. This feature will indeed show blog posts from the site's blog as long as they are <3 days old. I imagine the team may be willing to slightly bend that parameter but obviously not all the way to nine months.

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