Fusion News Feeds

[Rezwan]

There are many excellent fusion websites out there. These Fusion Program Notes, for example.

Things needed for a fusion info website:
Compiling the notes (feeds, microformat issues)
Analyzing the news for our audience,
putting things in context,
translating for a lay audience
Summarizing
drawing out highlights
Publishing said content processing.

What’s the workflow? What tools are needed? How can the website be improved as a platform for this use?

How scalable is this? Note, you’d want to begin with DPF news, from LPPX and from other DPF’s around the world, and feed in Aneutronic news. The process would be similar for any other layer of fusion news thereafter. NIF news, ITER news. ICC news…

We could set it up as departments, and a department would only get going if an editor for that department steps up. Or if others who are broadcasting have set it up for easy feed into our and other websites.

Thoughts?

[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote: There are many excellent fusion websites out there. These Fusion Program Notes, for example.

Things needed for a fusion info website:
Compiling the notes (feeds, microformat issues)
Analyzing the news for our audience,
putting things in context,
translating for a lay audience
Summarizing
drawing out highlights
Publishing said content processing.

What’s the workflow? What tools are needed? How can the website be improved as a platform for this use?

How scalable is this? Note, you’d want to begin with DPF news, from LPPX and from other DPF’s around the world, and feed in Aneutronic news. The process would be similar for any other layer of fusion news thereafter. NIF news, ITER news. ICC news…

We could set it up as departments, and a department would only get going if an editor for that department steps up. Or if others who are broadcasting have set it up for easy feed into our and other websites.

Thoughts?

An RSS aggregating homepage could be a huge headstart. I know there’s several WordPress ways to publish RSS, and a great many sites are built using WP as the CMS.

[Tulse]

ExpressionEngine (the CMS used here) has an RSS module as well.

[Rezwan]

OK. It turns out to be pretty simple to get news feeds.

Just for practice, I’ve added feeds to the Journal of Fusion Energy on our “Learning Center” page. You have to scroll down to see the feeds. (Hiding in plain sight – so we can talk about it, but I doubt anyone will see it there.)

Take a look at the feeds. The longer one is all recent articles. The shorter one (200 character descriptions) is a feed from a search for “Plasma Focus”.

Questions:

Which works better, long or short?
Targeted search – or should we do all fusion?
Which other journals are “must haves” for the Plasma Focus page?
And what about other approaches to fusion? Do we aggregate by “fusion in general” and separate by journal, or do we get a bunch of different journals and search each of them for, say, “MFE” or “ICF” or “Polywell” or what have you?

Standing by.

[Rezwan]

And after those decisions are made – next step is to graduate to advanced HTML only, so I can style it w/ CSS. Kind of stuck with their framework for now.

[Rezwan]

Here, by the way, is a list of fusion sites from which to cull good feeds.

http://fusionpower.org/OtherSites.html

A lot of them don’t have RSS feeds. The mission here is to set up a wish list that will extract the most useful news from these guys and dump it in one (or two or three logical) place(s).

Like, we’d aggregate the government/policy news one place, the Tokamak news in one place, ICC news in one place, education/fun initiatives in one place, and so forth.

[jamesr]

Here are a few sites I have bookmarked:

General news
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/
http://www.ipp.mpg.de/ippcms/eng/pr/index.html
http://www.sone.org.uk/
http://www.nuclearfuture.info/ibis/nuclearfuture/home

On the more technical side, for anyone wanting to learn about plasma physics:
Journals (need pay/institutional access for full papers but not news or abstracts):
Physics of Plasmas http://pop.aip.org/
Nuclear Fusion http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515/
Other IOP Journals: http://iopscience.iop.org/search?searchType=fullText&fieldedquery=plasma+focus&f=titleabs&time=all&submit=Quick+search&navsubmit=Quick+search

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/plasma/lectures/lectures.html
Bruce Scott’s homepage http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~bds/
LLNL’s Plasma dictionary http://plasmadictionary.llnl.gov/

and of course I would have to add a link to my own institution
Centre for Fusion Space and Astrophysics, University of Warwick http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/research/cfsa/

I’ve never really used RSS news readers, but appreciate their usefulness. I always prefer some, amount of human interaction in filtering and editorial comment on news items/press releases. This way, where possible, you can try to cite & link to the primary source article/paper – not just the news site item

[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote: OK. It turns out to be pretty simple to get news feeds.

Just for practice, I’ve added feeds to the Journal of Fusion Energy on our “Learning Center” page. You have to scroll down to see the feeds. (Hiding in plain sight – so we can talk about it, but I doubt anyone will see it there.)

Take a look at the feeds. The longer one is all recent articles. The shorter one (200 character descriptions) is a feed from a search for “Plasma Focus”.

Questions:

Which works better, long or short?
Targeted search – or should we do all fusion?
Which other journals are “must haves” for the Plasma Focus page?
And what about other approaches to fusion? Do we aggregate by “fusion in general” and separate by journal, or do we get a bunch of different journals and search each of them for, say, “MFE” or “ICF” or “Polywell” or what have you?

Standing by.

I like the shorter format. Also, trying to do all fusion rather than just pB-11 is going to take a lot of staff time, while adding confusion to newcomers. Nobody comes back to a confusing site.

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