Well, it's about time I started a new blog.
It’s been a very long time since I had my own blog. In recent years, I’ve had the privilege of guest blogging for various outlets, including The White House, The Good Science Project, dataindex.us, and Upstream (among others). I’ll continue to guest blog from time-to-time when a topic is appropriate for a specific venue. However, I can’t always find a home for some of my perspectives and this blog will fill that void in my publishing portfolio.
I have been wanting to start a blog for a long time but was entirely overwhelmed by hosting and platforming choices. However, I found the need strong enough to overcome my choice paralysis. After chatting about options with science-blogging guru Martin Fenner earlier today, I decided on keeping it simple and sticking with what I know. The result, a very thin Jekyll-based blog that has no bells or whistles what-so-ever. I chose the title, “Open Evidence” to reflect my general interest in evidence-based policymaking and advocacy for open science - but there will be lots of other topics as well.
Okay, there is one bell and one whistle. This setup uses the jekyll-feed plugin, which is supported by GitHub Pages. This allows readers to follow updates without relying on centralized social media algorithms. It also allows the blog to be indexed by The Rogue Scholar. I also added a simple slugify-based approach to incorporate tags. This is mainly for my own organization purposes.
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January 18, 2026— Updated the feed to use atom instead of rss at the suggestion of Martin Fenner and implemented updates.