Home

About this site

How to use the website

Peter Dickens and James Ormrod - the website editors - set up this website as a forum for discussion on the Sociology of the Universe after the publication of their book: Cosmic Society. Towards a Sociology of the Universe.

You are encouraged to contribute your ideas and comments - to engage in the debate. The way this works - at present - is this:

You don't need an account to contribute. Anyone can submit comments

At this time comments do not need to be moderated by the editors. 

You can request an account (go to the Login page) which will allow you to create new pages and add comments without moderation.

How to follow a discussion

Each of the topic pages has an RSS Feed icon  which you can click to subscribe to that page's discussion thread.

How to start a new discussion

Authorised users can create a new page to start a new discussion topic. 
To create a new page use the menu item "Create content >> Page".
When there, don't forget to click and select a value in the "button" menu to have the new page show up in the "button" topic's index page. And don't forget to edit the new page's "Menu settings": make the "Parent menu item" the same main topic as you selected from the "button" menu.

Now visitors will see your new discussion topic in the menu, grouped together with other discussions in the same topic area.

For those of you not familiar with the   icon

It's called an RSS Feed icon. By clicking the icon you will start the process that results in you being informed when there are any updates to the page on which you found the icon.  RSS Feeds are better than email for following discussions. You don't need an account on www.sociologyoftheuniverse.net to follow a discussion. Your computer will periodically check for updates and your email inbox won't fill up with unwanted email.

Your computer ia already set up to automatically check for any updates to discussion to which you are subscribed and it will unobtrusively let you know when there is activity on those discussions. The exact way in which you subscribe to more RSS Feeds depends on your operating system (e.g. Windows XP or Vista, Linux or Mac OS X); your email client (e.g. webmail, MS Outlook or Mac Mail) and your web browser (e.g. Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer)  but in any case, just clicking on an icon   will lead you through this simple process.Give i it a go!

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following people and groups of people without whom  this website would not be possible.

Images:

  • Mars Lander - NASA
  • Map of Earth Lights - C. Mayhew & R. Simmon (NASA/GSFC), NOAA/NGDC, DMSP Digital Archive
  • Omega Centauri - NASA
  • Van Gogh's La nuit étoilée - This image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

Software:

  • The Drupal CMS (Content Management System) with which this website is built. Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. A proportion of the fees for building and maintaining this website are donated to the Drupal Association. Drupal uses PHP and MySQL for programming on the server and JavaScript for programming on the client machine. These are also Open Source projects.

Webmaster