The Rogue Scholar science blog archive continues to grow, with seven new blogs added this month and more than 24,000 archived blog posts. Luckily, onboarding new blogs is mostly automated, with the Rogue Scholar API handling the blog setup and blog post ingestion from RSS feeds.
Some questions frequently come up and I try to improve the Rogue Scholar documentation to address them. Email is central to the onboarding process and when questions arise later. I like the interaction via email, as I learn to know the blog authors and their specific usage cases. These emails rarely contain sensitive information, so they could also be handled in a public forum using a platform such as Discord, Slack, Mattermost, Discourse, or GitHub Discussions. This has the benefit of addressing the same question to a group of blog authors, and blog authors bringing in their specific perspective, e.g. with a particular blogging platform.
This week I started a Rogue Scholar Slack community to enable these group conversations. The community is free to join via this link, which also appears on the footer of every Rogue Scholar page. The community has two channels: #general for announcements and general discussion and #help for specific questions and issues regarding Rogue Scholar. Please join the new Slack community if you have questions and/or are interested in giving feedback regarding new features of the Rogue Scholar platform. We can add more channels if more specific needs arise, e.g. for particular languages (German, Spanish, and French are the most popular languages besides English), or specific blogging platforms (WordPress, Hugo, Blogger, and Jekyll are the most popular platforms).
This blog is a good source to follow the development of the Rogue Scholar platform and it can be read via RSS feed or email newsletter. For people who prefer less frequent updates than the roughly one new post per week, I am starting a monthly newsletter that you can subscribe to separately with a first issue planned this Thursday. You can subscribe here.
