Friday, March 9, 2012

x3dna.org -- 3DNA's new home

It has been quite a while since my last blog post titled "3DNA base-mutation functionality for the study of pretein-DNA interactions" (dated Sunday, October 30, 2011). Over the past few months, I have been extremely busy laying the groundwork for 3DNA: both in software consolidation and hardware setup.

Here are some background details about what happened:
  • 3DNA now has a dedicated domain name x3dna.org. I tried to register with the obvious choice 3dna.org, but found that it has unfortunately been taken already. We thought about several alternatives, and finally settled with the domain name x3dna.org.

    This site is the new home of 3DNA, where -- instead of in the blog -- I will post related news and my personal views. Some of the 3DNA-related posts originally published here are being migrated into the "Highlights" section of x3dna.org. A side benefit of the switch is that 3DNA users from China and other regions where Google blogger is blocked can have access to the content.

    The site x3dna.org is powered by Textpattern, "a flexible, elegant and easy-to-use CMS". I shopped around for a lightweight CMS to host the new 3DNA homepage. I came across Textpatten and was impressed by the mere 484KB download size (v4.4.1). My positive experience over the past few months has made me love the CMS better.

  • The forum is now hosted under the subdomain forum.x3dna.org, powered by Simple Machines Forum (SMF). While I have been happy with phpBB3, I took the migration opportunity to try something new and found SMF a better option for the purpose of 3DNA. The forum site is where the documentation is located and  my interactions with the user community take place.

  • As a result of the new homepage x3dna.org and forum site forum.x3dna.org, the following three 3DNA-related sites previously hosted at Rutgers University have been retired; links to them are automatically redirected to the corresponding new locations:
    • The former v1.5 site at http://rutchem.rutgers.edu/~xiangjun/3DNA. Over the years, this site has received the most outside links.
    • The v2.0 site at http://3dna.rutgers.edu/, which accompanies the 2008 3DNA Nature Protocols paper.
    • The former forum site at http://3dna.rutgers.edu:8080/forum.
To summarize, now 3DNA has a new home at x3dna.org and forum site at forum.x3dna.org. With the infrastructure in shape, I can switch gears to focus on the scientific part of the 3DNA project: refinement, further development of its functionality, and better documentation.