This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has received two important updates: full-text search becomes the default search configuration, and blog authors can now self-manage basic settings of their Rogue Scholar blog community.
Full-text search as default
Rogue Scholar has long supported full-text search of all its content. With this update, users no longer have to specify that they want to search in the full-text content using the content: prefix. All queries now automatically search the full-text, e.g. this query for the term xanadu: https://rogue-scholar.org/search?q=xanadu.
You still can specify content: if you want to search only in the full-text, similar to how you can specify other fields to search in. And you can search either all of Rogue Scholar or a specific community. See the Rogue Scholar search guide for details.
Basic blog self-management
With the latest update the basic settings of Rogue Scholar blog communities can be managed by blog authors. They need a Rogue Scholar account and have to accept an invitation (send an email) as manager of the blog community. The basic blog settings (name, short description, website, and profile picture) are automatically extracted from the blog RSS feed. Still, they can be overridden in the blog community form, for example to add a profile picture if that is not included in the feed.
Registration of new blogs still requires filling out a separate form (found here), and the automatic blog post extraction can't be configured in the community form. Blog community managers also can't update their posts in Rogue Scholar, but they can submit their blog posts to one or more topic communities (such as R or Book Review) using the Communities sidebar settings.
Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments regarding these updates.
