Following UsefulChem Experiments

If you have been wondering why there has been a drop in the activity on the UsefulChem Experiments Blog, remember that we have moved our group lab book to the wiki.

The best way to find out who is doing what on an hourly basis is to click on the Recent Changes link on the left of the wiki. Clicking on the pages that come up will then take you to a particular experiment in progress (for example). From there the History button will show the most recent changes to that experiment. You can compare what was added (in green) and what was deleted (in red) by clicking on the pics in the list (for example). That way it is possible to find out not only what happened but also HOW the student, supervisor and colleagues arrived at the results, presented arguments in the discussion and came to their conclusions.

This is just not possible to do with a blog. However, we will be migrating over completed (or as close as completed as we think they will get) experiments to the experiments blog for a convenient way to be alerted to just the completed experiments via a clean and simple RSS feed (click on the subscribe with Bloglines button at the top of the blog page). The wiki does have an RSS feed but it gets updated every time there is a minor change, which makes it harder to use practically for anyone outside of our immediate group.

I have also created a contents page to quickly brief anyone on all of our projects. There are links from there to each experiment in progress or completed. We appreciate the feedback we have been getting so far and we welcome future comments on any aspect of our work from chemists anywhere.