Biased BBC Site Upgrade

We’ve all seen the serious problems on the Biased-BBC site over the last few weeks.

Please let me explain them and also say what we have been doing to sort them out.

Two separate problems occurred almost simultaneously and you may have assumed they were connected – but they were not.

* Google began a rollout of regional blog identities. This is designed specifically to allow them to control/censor content in different countries. In practice for us that means that we have been commenting on at least 5 different B-BBC sites and so our comments have been scattered. There’s no useful fix for this.

* Google also withdrew the Google Friend login facility last month. As our Comment provider, Echo, is no longer being supported by its original developer because they have moved on to bigger, shinier and more profitable things we also lost that ability to log in here and they will not fix that.

As a result it became an unexpected and rapid project for us to move to a new solution.

The response to David’s appeal was fantastic and enabled us to organise new hosting with a new comment system. We’ve chosen WordPress and to use their comment system – which doesn’t require registration if you don’t wish to do so.

The new address is biasedbbc.tv

This will be the last post on the old Blogspot URL although the site will remain here as a reference.

Several things to bear in mind please:

The move to the new site has been rushed through because of the Google and Echo problems. There will be teething problems. Some things will not work straight away. I will be working on these constantly until they are resolved. Please email me with problems or use the Open Thread that I will set up on the new site for issue reporting but I will not be able to respond to everybody instantly or even maybe individually due to the number of comments that I anticipate. Also, technical issues will be given priority over cosmetic comments.

Important: I will not be able to import Comments from the previous site until next week. Please do not report missing past comments as an issue.


I want to say thank you especially to a friend of this blog and a friend of mine MaxFarquar for again designing the new blog graphics. Max did the design for the previous blog too – as a favour – and if you feel like popping over to his place and leaving a small thankyou in his Donation jar then I am sure it will be appreciated.

If you have any error reports, problems, issues, questions…email me here. I can’t guarantee to get back to you promptly because I’m expecting a busy few days pulling this all together but as always I’ll do my best to help.

AllSeeingEye

Administrivia

We’ve been getting many reports this week of blog readers not being able to use this site from overseas. The biggest problem is that Comments show up as 0.

The problem started a few weeks ago in Spain. Readers from there had a .es extension forced on their blog browsing by Google. This is a strategy by them to localise blogging in order to make country-specific content censorship possible.

Google are rolling out this ‘upgrade’ country by country and it now appears to have hit our readers in France.

There is a workaround which is to add /ncr to the end of the web address. The main problem with this workaround is that it doesn’t work.

Your site admins are working hard this week to solve this and other problems with a server and platform move. Please expect some disruption and downtime. We will give as much notice as possible of any breaks in transmission! There will probably be a radical redesign at the same time…no point in doing things by halves, is there?

Please bear with us whilst Google/Blogger do their best to destroy the blogging community and the B-BBC team try to save our corner of it.

AllSeeingEye

Administrivia

Due to unforeseen technical circumstances (it broke without anyone touching it, honestly!) the Google Friend Connect option has been temporarily taken off of the Echo comments login list.

Well, actually that exact option is permanently off because Google seem to have retired it. Ooops.

We are currently chasing Echo to see if there will be a Google alternative via them. We’re also looking at other ideas up to and including other comment systems…all options are up for discussion; offers of assistance or just good old fashioned sympathy/suggestions/abuse in the Comments below.

Apologies for the inconvenience. Hopefully a solution will be found quickly.

ADMINISTRIVIA

Biased-BBC were asked on a recent thread if we had any logos suitable for putting in a side-bar on your own blog to link back here.

Via the marvellous delegation skills of our Gracious Host David (“Eye, can you sort something out?“) and the most excellent design skills of the GrumpyOldTwat here they are. You only have to copy the code into a blog widget for them to work, changing the image size within the code if necessary (on these settings they’ll come out just a bit too wide for the left margin of this blog as a guide).

<a href=”http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com”><img src=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_JqYd3xXiruw/TF8r1FoNc4I/AAAAAAAADVU/jNL9lqiaiy8/s320/biased+bbc+1+line+200px.jpg” style=”border: 0;” height=”44″ width=”200″ alt=”Biased-BBC Blog” /></a>

<a href=”http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com”><img src=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JqYd3xXiruw/TF8ofg1M9mI/AAAAAAAADVM/XmkH5zrm9zI/s320/biased+bbc+200px.jpg” style=”border: 0;” height=”91″ width=”200″ alt=”Biased-BBC Blog” /></a>

Please do visit GOT’s blog for some adult political satire and knockabout mixed with skilful graphics work, and if you have any problems with the code or questions you can email me, AllSeeingEye, here.