Popularization of science

Hello!

My name is Vyacheslav Golovanov, and already more than four years I regularly publish on Habré.

I started writing articles because I decided that I have something to share with people. Then I joined the authors reward program , and then I was offered the position of a full-time editor. So, almost imperceptibly for myself, I got here.

At first I did translations of articles on various topics, often on development, for example, I designed the translation of an entire web book, Expressive Javascript". Then I gradually became interested in popular science topics, began to make news articles. As a result, I found myself in longrid translations - long articles on popular science topics. I made myself a certain set of source sites with high-quality materials, introduced“ Habra ”users to blogs cosmologist Ethan Siegel , specialist in particle physics Matt Strassler , creator of the Wolfram Language system Stephen Wolfram .

During my work here, Habr, like an unstable particle, divided into three parts, sprinting "Megamind" and "GeekTimes", then again united with "Megamind", and after some time - with "GeekTimes". And then the site editors decided to concentrate solely on the subject of development, and no longer waste resources on popular science materials.

And then I suddenly realized that I had lost something. I am not just accustomed to translating articles on psychology, physics, astronomy, and other interesting things. I really enjoyed working with these articles. This was especially true of topics related to astronomy and cosmology. While reading (and translating) articles about stars, galaxies, the universe, I experienced trembling and awe. Black holes drew me in, my consciousness expanded according to the Hubble law, and the flashes of quasars illuminated the path of knowledge of the secrets of our world. And suddenly it all ended.

I realized that I didn’t want to say goodbye to this, I could not but continue to work with this topic, and I must somehow go further along this path. Judging by the statistics and your responses, the topics of my translations were interesting to many readers of the resource. And when I left a sad note under the "last"article on the universe , I received a huge number of comments, letters and messages with regrets, requests (and sometimes even requirements!) to continue.

Naturally, there were people who liked this state of things - they did not like what I was doing, they believed that these materials were not needed on the resource. I can congratulate them on the fact that there will be no more such materials here, and wish all the good and pleasant reading to Habr. For the rest - I will continue.

After all this, I practically have no other choice but to create my own resource in order to continue translating interesting materials on the popular science topic, contribute (as I humbly hope) to popularize science, please regular readers with texts, and develop as a translator . On Habré, I will continue to publish - but exclusively in line with the new policy, that is, on technical topics like development, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc.

Habr's leadership decided to support this undertaking by highlighting my “startup” this blog, in which I will occasionally publish selected materials from my site. So, welcome to my resource about science, golovanov.net .

Technical details

Habr is primarily intended for developers, so I will share the details of the launch of the project.

Hosting

I launched my first website in 1998, exactly 20 years ago. Since then, many terabytes have flowed, and the technology has changed a lot. I haven’t been involved in the creation and hosting of new sites for a long time, but there was still some hearing, so I chose what I’ve heard about - DigitalOcean.

It turned out that today launching your site is incredibly easy. I registered an account, chose an OS, a couple of clicks. and now a virtual machine - a “tittle”, as DigitalOcean calls its virtuals — is ready to work (as long as everything works on the simplest tariff, and then we'll see). Tie a domain to the server - a couple of trivia.

Following the trend of a gradual transition to the encrypted Internet, I installed the Let's Encrypt system. I put it through the console - if I understood correctly, automatic installation through the DO control panel for some reason costs money.

Wordpress

As a content management system, I chose WordPress. Insanely popular system, with a huge number of extensions, add-ons, information, documentation ... Install WP on DigitalOcean server? There is nothing easier. You don’t even need to set anything up - a ready-made LAMP complex (Linuix, Apache, MySQL and PHP) + WP is available.

Then, however, had to pretty tricky. With the choice of topics and fine-tuning for their needs and views, with the procedure for creating a child theme. With the selection of the necessary plugins - not all seemingly necessary functions are available in WP "out of the box".

What I finally stopped at:

Contact Form 7 - they say the most popular plugin of all. Just a feedback form. In addition to it, the Flamingo plugin for storing sent messages.

Insert Headers and Footers - allows you to insert text into the header and footer of pages without editing the theme files.

Mistape is a convenient way to report errors on the site. Select the text, press Ctrl-Enter.

Page Views Count Plugin - shows the number of post views directly in it (like on Habré)

SendGrid - unfortunately, to combat spam, DigitalOcean does not allow sending emails to all new customers whose services have been running for less than 60 days. I had to look for an intermediary. The SendGrid service offers a free mailing list, with certain restrictions - 40,000 letters in the first month, and then 100 letters a day.

Wordpress Social Login- I had to tinker with finding a plug-in for simplified user registration via social networks. Who asks for a lot of money, who does not work with Russian social networks, who are really very buggy. As a result, he stopped at an open project based on the hybridauth package, which is used in various CMS. I considered such a plugin to be mandatory, because nobody likes to register once again. It is a pity that the habrov user authorization system does not have an API for use in third-party projects - through registration in this case would be the way.

WP Statistics (Verona Labs) - beautiful viewing of statistics

WTI Like Post - setting ratings for posts (plus / minus)

Yandex.Share - adds links to "share" for Russian (and not only) resources.

Website launch

Technical problems are the simplest. The site is up and running, is being tested by the battle. But, unfortunately, in the form of a hobby, this project will not survive. There will be too few articles, and it will not be interesting to anyone. The project needs material support.

While I plan to gradually fill the site with articles, and think about what form of fundraising is best to use. I plan to spread from 10 to 20 articles per month on topics of space, brain, psychology, ecology, and other popular science topics. I will be glad to all the advice and comments.