Walkthrough the Nuclear Fissionary Website

With our site up and running I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of the technical details of our website. Beyond contributing to what is already an excellent community of pro-nuclear bloggers, our goal with Nuclear Fissionary is to provide a web presence that is clean, clear, and usable.

WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.” ~WordPress.org

For well over two years now Jack Gamble, Jason Morgan, and myself have been blogging exclusively with WordPress as our content publishing platform. During this time we’ve grown from not-so humble amateur bloggers into folks who have a firm knowledge of WordPress and its many benefits. WordPress has proven itself as a great platform for our collective improvement as writers and search engine optimizers, as well as my personal evolution as a web designer. This is the precise reason why we chose to use WordPress as the foundation for Nuclear Fissionary.

Thematic Theme Framework

Moving beyond the WordPress architecture, I developed a fully customized theme for Nuclear Fissionary on Ian Stewart’s Thematic Theme Framework. Theme frameworks create a parent-child relationship that affords substantial customization and scalability without compromising the parent’s source code. From a front-end web development perspective, it keeps upgrading the theme framework—that evolves with WordPress—a very simple process. In simplest terms our theme is a custom-built (child) theme of the (parent) Thematic Framework.

Subscribe to Follow our Site Automatically

In the top-right corner of our site we feature four icons positioned above the search bar. For the fellow bloggers among us, I’m sure you are familiar with these, but for those who don’t know the icons are here to make following our site a breeze. From left to right you can subscribe to our articles if you use an RSS reader, follow @Fissionary on Twitter, become a fan of our Nuclear Fissionary page on Facebook, or sign-up to receive an automated e-mail the morning after a new article is published (Eastern Time).

Social networking is a big part of what we do. Between Twitter and Facebook we try to maintain a very active presence that encourages discussion, information sharing, and the occasional debate. Those who have been following Jack’s musings from the @Fissionary Twitter account know exactly what I mean. We try to keep ourselves open and available as we try to build upon this community. There are lots of people out there with little knowledge, or even worse incorrect knowledge when it comes to nuclear energy, and we aim to steer those people in the right direction.

Keep Track of Nuclear Sites and Bloggers

As one of the newest entrants to the Nuclear Energy Blogging niche we join a well established community that has been doing a tremendous job advocating the virtues of nuclear power. You’ll notice that we feature some of the Nukes of the Net on the bottom left corner of our footer and we house a more complete list of websites on our Nuclear Resources page. If you are not doing so already we encourage you to follow these other sites so that you can benefit from their diverse expertise and insider know-how.

Also, if you know of other nuclear sites—or have a nuclear site of your own and you would like to see it added to our Nuclear Resources page, please drop a comment to this post and leave the URL in the comment. I’ll be happy to add the site to our list.

This Site Design is Never Done

Now that we’ve launched my desire to further design, develop, and expand the site will not stop. From a web perspective my work is never done—and I really like it that way. My singular focus is to make Nuclear Fissionary’s internet home all that it can be. If this site is cluttered, difficult to navigate, or unintuitive in any way I have failed in my job.

With this in mind if there is anything that can be done to improve what is already here I am always eager for suggestions, recommendations, and criticism. This site is not here for Jack, Jason, and myself. It is here for people who want unobstructed to access to information about clean—safe—reliable nuclear energy.