Rearranging the furniture

It just dawned on me that I had several fruit blogs in the "Fruit-ish Links" section, even though I had a perfectly good "Other Fruit Blogs!" section, so I moved 'em. Don's Cold Hardy Citrus Blog kind of doesn't look like it's a blog anymore, but I moved it and I'll sort that out later.

The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog is a blog, but not a fruit blog, so I'm keeping it where it is. Still probably doesn't make any sense, but oh well.

I briefly considered alphabetizing, but I don't have that kind of ambition. Please don't read anything into the point at which your site appears in the list--it's wherever was most convenient to insert it at a given moment, not a ranking or a measure of my love.

And yeah, I know this doesn't really require a post and that no one cares about the links and their arrangement. But by posting this I'm maintaining the illusion of frenetic burst of activity on this site!

Thanks...

Aww...thanks guys. It's nice to feel missed. I can't make any promises, but as spring starts to sneak up I feel myself thinking more of the wonders of the fruit world beyond my own job...

Oh, and Adam...just call me "Evil". I consider us colleagues.

And Japanese Comment Spam Guy...thank you for standing by me through all the unproductive months. While other people remained silent as I posted nothing, you kept up a steady dialog with yourself and all those people who would click on a random link labeled "SEX" in the midst of a block of Japanese. Thank you for steadfast faith in my blog and the fact that I was far too lazy to delete you on a regular basis.

(Blogger appears broken at the moment, so you get this as a post, not a comment).

In the meantime, have another Canadian 'Red Prince' article.

How do you like them apples? (Canadian Business)

More later, promise.

50,000 visits!

Just thought I'd note that the Fruit Blog scored it's 50,000th visitor today! (Or actually, it's 50,000th visit--I'm sure 10,000 of those are just me, over and over again, but I'm not going to quibble). Interestingly, the counter at the bottom doesn't register it...that thing has been out of whack with the internal numbers for a while. I should probably get rid of it, but I've gotten used to looking at it.

If you'd told me in 2005, when I started this thing, that I'd ever hit 50,000 visitors, I'd have laughed. That there's so many of you that want to read me random fruit-ramblings is both amazing and encouraging, and gives me hope that maybe I'm not quite as insane as some of my friends make me out to be.

I kind of feel like some sort of critical mass was accomplished in the last month or so--things seem to have really picked up in terms of traffic here.

Anyway, thanks again for showing up, and for all the contributions readers have made in comments and e-mails. See you at 100,000!

Another honor from a site I've never heard of.

Actually, I think it's essentially the same site, since the same person e-mailed me to let me know about it.

Anyway, it looks like we're in the top 100 Botany Blogs, too (#13 this time, though again it doesn't really look like a ranking).

(I kind of suspect their both just scams to link to as many popular blogs as possible to drive up traffic on their own site, which is one of those content-poor places you stumble across when Googling and wonder if anyone ever reads. However, regardless of the motivation, I am once again in good company, so I'm rather complimented anyway.)

#39 is good enough by me

Well, I know absolutely nothing about the website, but I'm not going to question anyone who ranks The Fruit Blog among the top 50 genetics blogs.

Even aside from the opportunity to brag about my honors, it's worth checking out, because there are some great sites there. Some, like Sex, Genes, and Evolution, John Hawks' Weblog, and Pamela Ronald's Tomorrow's Table, I've been following for a while, but there are a bunch of others in there that look absolutely fascinating.

(Considering they seem to have grouped them by category, I suspect the ranking is meaningless.)

A new year and a new look for the Fruit Blog

Well, I know I've been a bit scarce lately...between the holidays and everything else my mind's just been elsewhere. But I made a sort of New Year's resolution to keep this thing going, so I sat down to write a new post...

...and instead I re-did the blog template. Hopefully everyone likes it. I don't really know HTML that well, and there are still lingering issues (expect tinkering here and there for a while). There wasn't really a grand vision or anything--I just started screwing around with things.

The first thing you'll probably notice is the second sidebar. I decided to do this because to put everything in the one sidebar meant that useful things frequently got buried way, way down at the bottom. I may have somewhat reduced the impact of this by interspersing the fruit watercolors (from the USDA collection), but I thought they looked cool, and they kind fixed my problem with the grey not going down to the very bottom of the page like I wanted. I know things are a little more cluttered now...but hopefully not unreadably so.

Probably the biggest addition is the "Books" section in the sidebar. These are books about fruit and breeding that I've found interesting over the years (I don't actually own all of them, but I do most, and I've at least looked at all of them). The titles link to their respective Amazon pages (although some are out of print, and so your only hope is going to be a used copy). In the interest of full disclosure: I am a part of the Amazon Associates program, and get a cut (a very small cut) of anything you buy through these links. I have mixed feelings about this, since I didn't create this blog with the intention of making money (and what a fool I'd have been if I had!). But I do have a few costs here and there (domain name registration, for example) and a couple of bucks would provide me a little more incentive to keep things going around here when things get slow. I've been approached several times about placing ads on the site, but I've always turned them down. This way I keep control of what gets advertised, and hopefully people find some interesting or useful books. (It's kind of a pain to set up the links, so I have to admit I didn't put a ton of care into their organization or selection. I'll keep adding and arranging this section over time. If you have any suggestions you'd like added, let me know).

Anyway, hope everyone had a happy holidays, and hopefully you'll be seeing a little more of me. Please let me know if the new layout has screwed something up for you, or if you hate it or would like to see other enhancements.

Update: I've checked the new template in Safari, two versions of Firefox, and Flock. I'll check it in Chrome and Explorer when I get to work on Monday, but frankly I don't hold out a lot of hope for Explorer...the site's always looked kind of crappy on it, and I doubt this made it any better.

Jeesh...

...is there a limitless supply of these scraper sites? I crush one out and another pops up. This one appears to be mirroring it automatically.

So this one's for them:

You are reading The Fruit Blog:

thefruitblog.blogspot.com
or
www.thefruitblog.com

If you are reading this anywhere else (except on an RSS reader or through FoodCandy), then the site you are reading this on stole this content. Please do not patronize their advertisers, and please feel free to tell them how you feel about about stealing content (assuming you feel badly about it--if you're really into it and think its awesome, you don't need to say anything. Also, please go away.)

Okay, now I feel a little better.

Um...crap.

Looks like my drive to change things around here has already screwed something up. I'm honestly not sure how...as far as I know I just added some blockquote formatting, tried it out, realized stuff was messed up, and deleted everything I changed. Please hang on while I figure out what the heck is going on.

Update: Well, I'm not sure what was, but I figured where it was (in a post, not the template, which is what threw me) and basically rebuilt that bit from scratch, so we're back to normal. Until I screw something else up...

Update 2: While I was in fixing things, I spiffed up the little menu bar beneath the header to match the new header a little better. I'm messing around with some cool stuff for this menu bar, but since I don't know what I'm doing it's not really functional yet, so this will have to do in the short run.

Fruit Blog Episode IV: A New Look

What do you think of the new banner graphic? Nothing too fancy, maybe, but not too shabby for 15 minutes of work, I think.

I've decided to make a few changes to the look of things around here. You probably haven't stared at this page as much as I have, so maybe you're not as sick of it as I am, but this site has looked essentially exactly the same for the entire course of its existence (except for the addition of the keyword buttons below the title) and I kind of feel like having fun with it.

That said, I'm likely to do so relatively slowly, with little baby steps, because I'm deathly afraid of breaking something.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts. I'm not great with HTML, but I can usually manage simple things. And please let me know if something I've done has broken some part of the site for you, so that I can fix it or at very least write to you and apologize.

(I might note that this post failed to post successfully via Flock, which does not bode well for that particular little experiment. Too bad, really, because I'm liking the browser).

Pomegranate Roads

I found a link about this book via our friends at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog and thought I would pass it along.

Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist's Exile from Eden (Floreant Press)

I have a blog dedicated to fruit and science. This is a book about a fruit scientist. Do I get an offer of a review copy? No, instead I get them for dozens of cookbooks about meat. I get offers to review books every few weeks, including promotional offers and possibilities to interview authors, but there really has only been one relevant enough to review here. (And I don't feel like I can ethically accept copies of books I'm not going to review, even though some of the cookbooks look pretty cool.)

In other news, this is the 200th post on the Fruit Blog.

The moment you've all been waiting for...

Actually, I wasn't even waiting for it...it was a bit of an impulse purchase. But, regardless, it is my pleasure to announce that this site is now available at thefruitblog.com! It still takes you to the exact same place, but for a few bucks I've now saved a few keystrokes for those who haven't bothered to bookmark the site. Hopefully it makes the name easier to remember for people as well.

(If it doesn't work for you right at the moment, try back in a bit...I'm guessing it may still be updating servers, but it works for me here right now...)

A minor change...

I've pulled the Recent Comments feature on the sidebar. It doesn't seem to be working, and I'm starting wonder if the strange things happening with the RSS feed are a result of the fiddling with the date format I did to make the comments hack work. So no more comments hack, and I've changed the date format a little. Let me know if it screws something up.

Change in e-mail subscriptions

I've changed e-mail subscriptions over from Bloglet to Feedburner. Bloglet was basically defunct when I started, and somewhere along the line it seems to have stopped working for me. (I probably should have just switched over to Feedburner immediately.) I can't actually change you over, but if you've already got a subscription, you'll be getting an e-mail offering the opportunity.

Feedburner has already been handling RSS feeds, which mostly works okay for me (though I hardly ever mess with it...frankly I don't have a need for a more convenient way to read things I wrote myself), but some people have had trouble with old posts appearing.

Any problems (or questions) regarding either feature, let me know.

A few little changes.

As my handful of regular readers may have noted, I recently added a little menu bar at the top with links to posts on various fruits (these run on tags, and since I've applied tags retroactively and in something of a hurry, I can't guarantee they all got tagged properly. Let me know if I missed something or tagged something incorrectly.)

The menu bar looks fine on all my computers (all Macs) and all the browsers I have, but at work one of the PCs butchers it in Explorer. Normally I'd just say something spiteful about Microsoft and let it go, but since half my visitors use Explorer, I thought that might not be very nice. So I've fiddled with it, and I appear to have fixed it.

Anyway, my point is, if it looks weird or wraps around, let me know. It's not that complex, but my HTML is limited.

The Fruit Blog Forum v2.0

The Fruit Blog Forum has always been a bit of a dud. I appreciate the occasional real posts that show up, but for the most part it's just been a spam magnet. Plus, even more offensively, it's full of popups, kind of clunky, and ugly (though I never put much effort into making it attractive.)

Somewhere along the line I came across this Runboard.com, which provides forums far more usable and less hideous than BraveNet. Tonight, after several seconds of intense consideration, I've decided to make the switch. I've left the other board accessible, so if you really, really love it you can keep hanging out there. Just don't expect me to stop by.

I've also moved the link higher up in the sidebar...I think part of why it didn't get much traffic before was that it was buried quite a long way down.

Anyway, stop by, and start a discussion: The Fruit Blog Forum v2.0

This is your opporunity to congratulate me...(hint, hint...)

I passed my qualifiers yesterday! I am officially admitted to candidacy for the PhD! Woohoo!

Also, completely coincidentally, at about the same time, the 10,000th hit came to my humble home on the web here. So that's pretty cool, too.

Seriously, I feel a bit self-conscious posting such things, but since other people have blogs detailing the dullest, tiniest minutiae of their lives, I figure I can post at least the big highlights now and again.

Fruit Science

Probably unnoticed, I added a new feature, a little segment in the sidebar called "Fruit Science". I've linked to articles involving fruit breeding and genetics in the current issues of relevant journals. If you (or your institution) subscribe, you'll often be able to read the whole thing, otherwise you're stuck with just the abstract, which should still be enough to get the major conclusions.

There's sort of a severe space constraint in the sidebar (I could widen it, I hate to start breaking things for people with laptops and small monitors) so the titles aren't real specific sometimes. I've indicated the journal with an abbreviation...I'm sure you can figure thm out.

Articles are chosen because they're current, or I find them interesting, not necessarily because they're earth-shattering, and will be updated on a "whenever I get to it" basis.

I know this sort of stuff has a somewhat limited appeal, but this is the side of fruit that I'm into, so for those of you more interested in eating or growing fruit, feel free to ignore it (I do like those aspects of fruit, too). For those who are interested, I'm always open to suggested additions, and would welcome discussions of the highlighted papers (or any other research) in the largely derelict Fruit Blog Forum

New developments

There have been a couple of new developments here I thought I'd point out:

- I've added the Fruit section of Fruits & Votes to the sidebar, since it's the only other fruit blog-like thing I know of out there.

- I've added the Farrago Recent Comments Hack from BloggerHacks. So now, in addition to recent posts, you'll be able to see the most recent comments on current posts down in the sidebar. I'm not entirely psyched about the implementation and may tinker some with it, but I hope folks like it. I hope it'll encourage people to post comments...more dialog would be welcome. (It had some problems earlier, but I think it's fixed...let me know if it does something weird.)

I've kind of been regretting the fact that the emphasis here has so far been so strongly on the "fruit" and not on the "fruit breeding". The problem has been how to do that without getting bogged down too heavily in the scientific, since as far as I can tell most of my readers are non-scientists.

I've been thinking of maybe trying to to do a series of articles, maybe "Fruit Breeding Fridays". I'd start out with some basic genetics (with examples in fruit), and then maybe look at specific traits and crops. Would there be any interest in this? Would it make you never read this blog? I'd still keep the emphasis on the fruit and not on DNA, because that's more or less where my own interests lie as well. And the rest of the posts would continue as they have been.

Anyway, a thought I've been kicking around.

Update: I fixed the messed up Fruits & Votes links above. You'd think at some point I'd learn to check links when I post them. (But you'd be wrong.)

The Mysterious Disappearance of The Fruit Blog

For reasons I cannot fathom (or at least reasons I don't know), the Fruit Blog decided to become inaccessible sometime yesterday. I tried loading it several times, always being told I wasn't allowed to access it.

Finally, this morning, I tried republishing it (since Blogger itself appeared to be fine.) And that seems to have fixed it, whatever the problem was.

So I apologize for the untold traumas you have all suffered in its absence, and I promise I will do my best to assure it never happens again.