Welcome to the New and Improved Design

Recent visitors to R-Squared will notice a distinct new look to the site that impacts all of Consumer Energy Report. This is a result of some long overdue upgrades, and I would like to detail some of the changes for readers.

Some of the code in the previous site was unnecessarily complex. This made the site load slowly. We have streamlined the code so you should see the site loading much faster than before.

The commenting system was also less than ideal. One could leave comments after a post, and then it replicated that in the forums. The intention was that the forums would have more functionality than the comments after the posts, but it was really just confusing for some people. In addition, when someone commented on an older post, it didn’t show up in the recent comments column to the right. Now, not only do they show up, but the most recent seven comments show up instead of the most recent four comments. Further, the comments will all be consolidated in a single location — after each post — and we have added increased functionality. I think the biggest improvement is that now comments can be threaded, which makes it much easier to manage different conversations.

New Writers

You may notice four new tabs at the top:

Biodiversivist — Econbrowser — Energy, Security, Policy — R-Squared Energy Column

That brings me to our next major change. We have added some new writers to Consumer Energy Report. Note that these writers will each have their own columns, and will focus on different topics. The new members on our team are: James Hamilton, Andrew Holland, and Russ Finley.

James Hamilton is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Board and has testified before the United States Congress. He has also been a consultant for the National Academy of Sciences, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the European Central Bank. James is the author of the Econbrowser blog, which is an excellent resource for people interested in high level economic analysis . His blog here on CER will be dedicated solely to the content he writes relating to energy. See his first article here: Reducing Petroleum Consumption from Transportation

Andrew Holland is a Washington-based expert on energy, climate change, and infrastructure policy. He currently serves as Senior Fellow for Energy and Climate Policy at the American Security Project, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington, DC. He will cover the topics of energy and the environment from a security, economic and legislative perspective. See his first article here: Energy Security, Economic and Environmental Stability

Russ Finley is a fellow engineer (mechanical) and an avid environmentalist. Many of the regular readers here may be familiar with him as a frequent commenter to my essays. He’ll be covering the topic of energy from an environmental perspective. See his first article here: Biofuels Update: How is the Industry Doing?

We hope to be adding more new writers in the future, and if you think that you fit the bill — or would like to suggest someone else that does — send a resume or details to Sam Avro: editor [at] consumerenergyreport [dot] com .

Upcoming Additions

We are also in the process of redesigning the homepage, which for now is being redirected to the Energy Ticker page. Additionally, in response to many requests, we are in the process of rolling out a mobile version of the entire site. This will alleviate many of the common problems that mobile users experience while navigating the site, such as height and width issues, and by minimizing the code even further it will speed up the loading of pages and comments on mobile devices which usually operate on a slower connection than desktop and laptop computers.

User feedback and bug reports are greatly encouraged, and can be sent to: webmaster [at] consumerenergyreport [dot] com .