First, there was the crappy old design. Then, there was the swish new design on the crappy old server. Now, after about a week of incredibly painful tinkering in Linux, PHP and MySQL, I've finally moved The Lay Scientist to a new server, which means I can finally set about upgrading and fixing the site properly. You probably won't notice the difference on the outside, but under the bonnet I'm completely reengineering the site to create the most powerful blogging platform I can.

BPDSB:
The BPSDB is my #1 priority, and it's going to be completely rewritten as a searchable database of bloggers. I'm going to fix the bugs in the current aggregator(written by a 3rd party), and then I'm going to strap on an awesome front-end that we can use as a search engine for bad science. All the work that us Bad Science Bloggers do will then be in one dedicated search engine. That then opens up all kinds of possibilities, from a Firefox plug-in that scans the URL you're on to see whether it's been flagged by a Bad Science Blogger, to customizable widgets that we can put on our blogs. I'll be working on that through the next month or two.

PodCasting:
The second big thing I'm going to be working on is a regular podcast. This will be monthly or fortnightly show of around 20-30 mins, and I want to use it to really bring the community together featuring interviews, the best blogging, guest spots for other bloggers, humour, piss-taking, you name it. If all goes to plan, Episode 1 should be arriving in January sometime.

Guest Bloggers:
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I'm opening up space for guest bloggers in order to both expand the amount of content here, and bring the commmunity closer. Several people have expressed an interest in participating, and I'll be contacting them in the New Year to set up accounts and let them lose. If you're interested in having your writing featured here and you haven't already contacted me, then get in touch!

So that's it for now! The Lay Scientist has a new machine, new code, and we're set to get bigger and better in 2009. And now that work is done, I can get back to some regular blogging!