[email protected]

Earthquake!

There was a 5.6 magnitude quake pretty close to the Stanford campus last night at around 8pm pacific time.  All is fine with FAH it seems, but it did shake us up quite a bit.  It's nice to have rackmounted servers securely mounted to those racks!

New web site, new links

Don't forget that while the main links will be the same (http://folding.stanford.edu is still the main site url), don't rely on other links being the same as they were before.  For downloads, check the download page on the web site for the new locations.

In general, the new site is looking good and we've gotten a positive response from donors in general.  Check out the translation pages and how they work -- *any* page can be translated just by hitting the language on the left.  In time, we'll improve the existing translations and add more translations from the old pages.

Web site overhaul

We've completely overhauled the FAH web pages.  The inspiration for the changes were multi-fold, but mainly the old site was looking a bit old stylistically and the translations were poorly integrated with the main text; in particular, the "download" pages were unique for each translation, yet only the English translation (main site) download page was updated. 

There will be several new features behind the scenes which will be useful to us

• The new backend for the web site is much more flexible, allowing the whole Pandegroup as well as some other collaborators to make direct edits to the site.  We expect that this will keep the site more freshly updated (esp in terms of the FAQ)
• The language translations will be MUCH better integrated.  Check this out: when on a page (any page), click on a language link on the left and get that specific page translated!  Chinese, English, French, and German are (mostly) all in, and more translations are on the way.
• Site search will now be integrated.
• Backend tricks will allow us to keep pages consistent -- between translations and even with the PandeGroup web site as well.
• Browser-specific pages: for certain pages (eg the download page), we will look to your browser to make specific recommendations (eg client recommendations) to hopefully greatly simplify the client-choice process (which has gotten really complex, due to all the clients we now support).

Our first goal was to get the site up and to port over the previous content.  Over the next few weeks, we'll also be updating the content (some of which is fairly old and deserves a good updating).

For now, please check it out
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/cgi-bin/

If all looks good over the next few days, this site will replace the old FAH site at the http://folding.stanford.edu url.

Forum down -- back up now

The folding-comunity forum is down.  This is run by donors, so we can't do anything directly to get it working (it's not our hardware, servers, etc), but I've forwarded the info along to those who run it and they should hopefully have a fix soon.  If not, we'll get some alternate site for forum activities so we can continue to address donors questions and concerns.

UPDATE:  UncleFungus got the forum back up just a few minutes after this post -- thanks for the super fast response!

Don't forget the forum

I should stress that this page is not for answering questions and I generally won't reply to comments too much.  That's what our forum is for (see http://forum.folding-community.org).  There are lots of people there (in my team as well as some really fantastic moderators) who can answer questions there.  This is more for me to try to make FAH more transparent and let people know what's going on.

Why the new blog?

PS People have asked me why the new site (instead of our old site on the folding.stanford.edu/news.html page).  The main idea is that I've been wanting to get new features up (RSS, etc) and it will take a while to get that done there, so the plan is to make something easy to blog to, so we can give better updates. 

The updates should be better in two ways:  1) we'll have a separate site from the forum (http://forum.folding-community.org) and the main FAH page, so in case of network problems, this place should be safe from the network/connectivity issues both have shown.  2) by making adding entries easy, hopefully we can greatly improve communication with all of the great donors participating in FAH.