We’ve got the seven-year itch! Since our grand opening in February 2002, we’ve been proud to be the website of the commutative algebra community. The web has gone through a number of generations since then, and it’s about time commalg.org caught up with the times. We therefore present commalg.org 2.0: the quickening.
The basic look and feel of the website hasn’t changed much, but the software beneath the surface has. We’re now using WordPress, and we hope that it will allow us to make updates more easily and more often. It also produces a number of Atom feeds (see the bottom of any page, under “Syndicate”) to make following us easy.
It also lets us do nifty things like this conference calendar, which we’re very excited about. (It’s available as a webcal feed, for those of you who know what that means.)
We hope you’re as excited about the new face of commalg.org as we are. If you have any concerns or suggestions, please let us know!
Here is the full list of new things on the site:
- We’re now powered by WordPress, a content-management system that will allow us to update the site more often and more easily, and to add new features we’re excited about.
- We now allow comments on news postings. (See below. You can even use LaTeX in comments!) We’ll have to see how this goes; spending all our time dealing with spammers is not our idea of fun.
- The contact form has returned, with the same caveat as above.
- The new conference calendar shows all conferences in our database, past and future, with their full durations. Finally we can tell the difference between a one-day regional conference and a semester-long program at MSRI.
- By popular demand, we’ve posted a big list of survey articles and other expository papers in commutative algebra and related topics. There are also a few gems in there like interviews with commutative algebraists and even whole online textbooks.
- We produce several kinds of “feeds” to allow you to follow what we’re up to without actually visiting the site. For example, the calendar produces a “webcal” feed, which you can use to subscribe to our calendar of conferences in iCal or Google Calendar. We also have Atom feeds (if you’ve heard of RSS feeds, that’s essentially the same thing) of all our content, or just news items, or just conferences. You can learn more about feeds here.
- The site’s been visually refreshed. The look and feel remain mostly the same, but a few things that have been bothering us for 7 years are now fixed.
- The fonts are larger and (hopefully) easier to read.
- The layout is now CSS-based (which only web nerds care about, but that’s at least one of us).