We’ve had a slightly slow start to 2025, as we’ve been aiming to get the new design live, before loading more content into the database. One difference is that our cover images are switching from being very landscape (3×1) proportioned to a more vertical image. But the redesign isn’t just about aesthetics – it reflects a fundamental shift in how we’re moving forward with sharing botanical knowledge.
We mentioned previously that there’s going to be a lot more posts that go directly to social media, so you get informed where you want. That sounds good, but if there’s a big article someone works on, these new short posts will push it off the front page rapidly. The aim of our front page now is try to highlight the new material, but still give the things you won’t find on social media longer promotion on our homepage.
Another reason for change is that the search engine landscape is changing. Google has strict guidelines on what to do with design if you want to be boosted by their search engine. The theory is that they’re optimising for mobile users, but I’m not sure that’s the case. It’s not just a matter of speed. Our new design should give articles a better visual look on phones as well as desktop. That comes with a speed cost, so Google may de-rate us. Oh dear.
That might not be a massive loss though. Google is scraping sites and feeding them into its AI, and then serving AI summaries of those sites – the idea being to keep viewers on Google looking at adverts, rather than escaping to the internet. Search traffic has fallen to sites that won’t pay for it. So we’re experimenting with ways to make viewing posts on site a better experience for you, guided by botany instead of Google.
Another switch is we’re now embedding discussion from Bluesky rather than Mastodon. The reason is that Mastodon is much more privacy oriented. This is excellent in many ways, but it does mean that it’s more difficult to track botanical discussion. Yes people can use hashtags to highlight posts, but how many people will remember for every relevant post, and is the hashtag Botany, PlantScience, PlantBiology etc…?
How does Pulse work?
Pulse works by looking for people using certain words or hashtags. It then applies a filter of people who are lovely but may not be using words the way we do here. For example, referring to Port Botany as Botany isn’t wrong, it’s just not what we’re looking for.
After that, it adds in output from accounts that talk about plant stuff a lot of the time. This is because people might post “Hey! Look at the crazy thing these cells are doing!” without thinking to add every possible relevant hashtag. It’s a safe guess these people are talking about Plant cells.
Then it shuffles the output to prioritise the posts that are popular and new. This should lift the plant content towards the top. The system doesn’t always get it right and the odd freak post can rise in the ratings, but it’s good enough that it should be mostly plant-based, most of the time.
If you’re on Bluesky, you don’t have to come here to follow it, you can follow it directly.
Another bonus of the redesign is that it makes the translation buttons more accessible in the mobile format of the site. The translations are largely machine translations, but not all of them. It seems a shame to have human translations of some the posts, and then make it difficult to find them. I hope this will be less of a problem now.
The design is an iteration of a design called Anymag by 3styler. While installing it, I found it doesn’t actually work correctly on our host. The staging site worked ok, the “live preview” worked without a flaw. It was just the live site that broke. If you see anything you think isn’t working, or something you feel could be improved you’re welcome to leave a comment. It’s been a lot of work adapting this, so I’ll sigh if you do, but the goal is to try to make things better, not make them easy. I can see a few issues with this version, so the work isn’t finished yet.
The first cover image is a hybrid of two photos I took at Leicester Botanic Garden. I had the only infrared photo that I ever managed to take properly, and an overblown early HDR image taken with a tripod on the same spot. This is a blend of the colour from the HDR with the detail from the infrared.
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