Skeptical Science Housekeeping – December 2020

Before the year 2020 comes to a close, we’d like to make you aware of a few visible changes applied to our homepage since we published this type of blog post in April.  Compared to this earlier blog post, the changes mentioned here are smaller in nature but especially the first one could prove to be quite useful.

New option to suggest updates for rebuttals

We fairly regurlarly receive emails via our contact form pointing out things like broken links or missing images in rebuttals. Sometimes emails mention suggested updates for a given rebuttal. As it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of these types of suggestions, we’ve now created a Google form to collect this feedback in a more organized way. To make it as easy as possible for you to provide feedback on the rebuttal you just read, you’ll now find the link to the form in a new section below each rebuttal.

RebuttalFeedback

Simply click on the link and you’ll be taken to the form which has the rebuttal’s URL already prefilled as well as your SkS username if you had been logged in when filling it out. If the field is empty please provide your name as it is a required field. You don’t need to specify an email-address but if you do, it’ll obviously help us to contact you in case of questions or to provide feedback about your suggestions.

FeedbackForm

Updated share buttons

The share buttons hadn’t been updated in a while so we used the opportunity when we added the button for MeWe to also grab the latest versions for the other platforms we have a presence on. Speaking of MeWe: have you checked our page there yet?

ShareButtons

Complete list of blog posts for authors

Up until very recently, only a certain number of blog posts written by a Skeptical Science author were listed on the author’s profile page. With this change, all of the author’s published blog posts are now listed on the page grouped by year.

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Preventing image width from breaking the page layout

You’ll most likely have noticed every once in a while that the page layout didn’t properly behave and that for example the header image started to duplicate where the right-hand margin should have been. This was often caused by uploaded images not respecting the maximum width for the page. A fix now ensures that the maximum allowed width for displayed images is not exceeded.

New error messages

Last but not least, something we hope you’ll not encounter (too) often on our homepage: errors like “page not found” or – a lot worse! – “internal server error”. But as we all know s**t happens and in case it does, Cranky Uncle will let you know!

Errors

Last but not least, let’s give credit where credit is due: none of these updates would have happened without the tireless work provided by Collin in the SkS boilerroom!