TL:DR – Updating Sciencebase systems and using MidJourney to generate some intriguing artwork to illustrate a blog post.
As regular readers will know, I’ve been running the Sciencebase site since July 1999. Its precursor, Elemental Discoveries, had various homes on the web from December 1995 until that fateful summer. There are almost 4000 articles in the archives, so it’s quite a hefty site for a one-man show.
Anyway, having played around with various website options in the last couple of weeks, I’ve finally done a proper spring clean, got rid of some very out-of-date articles and updated others that were worth keeping. I’ve upgraded security and performance stuff so the site should load much faster than ever before but also present no security problems to visitors (I don’t think it ever did, to be honest).
I’ve also now added a new and improved search box. I’ve also made search easier for mobile users who can now access the search box from the menu rather than guessing where it might be and having to scroll to the bottom of the page. The new search box also anticipates what it is you might be searching for. So, if you start typing “avian” it might assume you’re after information on “avian influenza” of which there is quite a lot in the Sciencebase archives.
All in, I hope the site is now offering an improved experience for the 3000 or so unique visitors the site gets every day!
I also wanted an illustration for this blog post about all the updates and so prompted MidJourney with the spider web emoji to allude to the world wide web and websites. It came back with four images, as it does. Two were odd superhero, Spider Man type images, one was rather eclectic and showed a girl staring through the window of a house at raging fire in the middle of the room.
The other seemed much more apt. It purportedly showed a young boy in a red hoodie with his back to us presumably staring at a large, old-fashioned television screen. A child dreaming of a future, perhaps? It also struck me as being rather of the style of artist Hugh Syme who worked on album covers for the Canadian rock band Rush for decades.
Indeed, this generated boy watching TV image might almost have been an outtake from the designs for the band’s Power Windows album which also features a boy and television screens. I might use it for some of my music output at some point, but have annotated it for now with my name and the word SCIENCEBASE.