The Einstein@Home project has made its first distributed computing discovery from the Arecibo Observatory data! The Einstein@Home volunteers whose computers found the pulsar with the highest significance are Chris and Helen Colvin, from Ames Iowa and Daniel Gebhardt, Musikinformatik, Universitaet Mainz.

Additional details can be found on the Einstein@Home website.

When I rebuilt the Discussion Forums on our site, I also began a complete overhaul of the main website, and a couple of other sites on domains we own. That work was put on hold while we attended to a lot of new work and other projects that came up. I’ve been back to work on it all, again. The new site design is up and working, albeit with a lot of work to do yet on content material. I’ve started writing some of that, and have quite a bit more planned for the coming months. I’m always open to suggestions and anyone with good writing skills that wants to contribute content material should feel free to contact me.

The site will probably have that “under construction” look for awhile, as I have to spread the work out over a number of active projects. The new site designs all allow for more advertising on the sites, because quite frankly, I need to offset the hosting and related costs. They are also eating up a huge chunk of my time. I want to work on more of the HOW-TO and tutorial type articles, as these are quite popular and generate the most traffic to the site. They’re also very time consuming to write, so it is going to take awhile.

I’d like to encourage all members to consider sending me information and pictures for the MEMBERS section of the site. There is a sample profile up there to give you some ideas on what kind of information you might want to provide. I believe this section of the site might help quite a bit in recruiting new team members and promoting the family atmosphere our small team currently enjoys. This is something that I think is important to us all and that we can preserve as the team grows. Of course, it won’t help much if we don’t actually use it, so look at what is currently up there and send me your info, folks. You can add your own custom fields, omit the ones you don’t want to provide… whatever works for you.

The GALLERY section is also in need of more content. Pictures of your cruncher farm, however elaborate or humble, are welcome additions. Galleries of your other hobbies, interests or accumulated oddities are just as welcome. Anything you might think visitors will enjoy viewing and that gives them an idea of the many walks of life our members come from would be fine for this section. I designed it to handle a lot of material and to be fairly quick and easy for me to add new galleries to it, without having to stay up all night. So again, feel free to contact me with your ideas, suggestions and contributions.

The ARTICLES section is the same way. I’d like to convert all the good HOW-TO stuff our members come up with to static HTML pages in this section, as they get posted in the forums. They can also be written using a word processor or text editor and sent to me. I’ll fix them up for use in this section of the site. If your writing skills aren’t the best, don’t worry about that. I’ll edit them as needed and get with you to make sure they’re right before they’re added. On the old site, our tutorials and the HOW-TO information pages generated the most traffic, so I’m pretty sure that the site can be a good recruiting tool for our team if I can keep adding new content material on a regular basis.