The New Cosmic Diary is now open

Some of you may have noticed that the Cosmic Diary Blog was unavailable over the past 2 weeks due to the migration of the Blog to the SETI Institute server. I am happy to announce that thanks to the great effort of our IT team (Special thanks to J. Brewster!), the blog is now back and will soon expand with new bloggers.

We have been planning for a while to make this major change but we had to postpone it due to lack of time and clear knowledge on the WordPress server. But it is now done, and it is very likely that in the following weeks we will modernize the template and add new bloggers, several of them from the SETI Institute. The previous posts of bloggers who “has retired” are now archived in http://archive.cosmicdiary.org/.

I should remind you that the Cosmic Diary was an initiated in the framework of the International Year of Astronomy in 2009. I joined this IYA cornerstone project when it started in January 2009 and since then I have been blogging on a semi-regular basis. In the beginning of 2011, I took over the project as a manager and the web site was partially hosted by the SETI Institute. Today, we finalized the transfer with a multi-user WordPress server which will allow us to add new bloggers and modernize the design of the web site.

I definitely wish that I have more time to dedicate to this activity but unfortunately blogging takes time and often conflict with my scientific activity. To be frank, there is not a day I am thinking about blogging something but when the time has passed, I am reluctant to do it. I started the year 2009 by claiming that I will write 2 posts per week. Today, I am wiser and I have more experienced, so I will be more realistic: Let’s say that I will blog in average twice a month in order to:

– discuss any scientific news that I feel comfortable to discuss here

– summarize a conference or workshop that may interest some of you (and my colleagues)

– describe an idea that I did not fully develop yet but for which I would like to have inputs/comments

– write a review on a book or comment the  published work of  colleagues

– talk about my scientific life in general

Don’t hesitate to remind me about this resolution, if you don’t see a post on this blog for more than 2 weeks.

Clear Skies

Franck Marchis (Twitter @AllPlanets)