BritBlog blog back?

I’ve recovered what I can from the old blog database and moved it up to WordPress.com. I guess if anyone can keep wordpress secure it’s these guys, so fingers crossed we’ll have more luck this time.

I noticed quite a few nasty things in old blog — it looks like some spammers had got in much earlier than the last attack and set up a load of hidden divs containing link spam in loads of the old posts. I’m thinking a monitoring service that alerts you of suspicious activity on your blog would be handy…. another one for the ideas book!

So where are we? Well the blog is back now – I’ve just got to buy some WordPress.com credits and point the DNS at this site so we have blog.britblog.com back. I guess the theme could do with a tweak, but that’s not critical.

Next I’m going to see what I can do with the BritBlog directory itself. First pass will be a read-only version of the site I should think. Not sure on the timescales for this yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Back Log Crisis.

Hello everyone it’s been along time since I’ve posted anything on here as I normally leave it to Mark, the back log at the moment however is massive so I’m appealing for anyone who has registered as an editor to please sign in and review a few blogs.
There is a back log of over a thousand blogs and I seem to be the only person reviewing them it’s never going to get done at this rate. I shall also be posting a comment on each of the team members blogs and I’ll just have to hope you all can remember your login details, if not then contact Mark I’m sure he still has a record of all of them.
If you are waiting for your blog to be reviewed don’t despair I am working on the Back Log and hope to get some more of editors involved again too to speed things up.
If anyone wants to become an editor please contact Mark and he’ll provide you with the login details you need to do it. It’s very simple you just have to check the site is a blog, that the author or authors are in the UK or former residents of the UK. Comments also have to be enabled and the blog has to have a point other than making money and have more that a couple of posts, Once you’ve checked it meets these criteria or not you approve or reject it accordingly.

Icon of Britain Photo Challenge

Hey all, I thought it would be fun to start a little photo challenge, and I’ve called it Icon of Britain^*.

The goal is to highlight great photos taken by our members of iconic British scenes/scenery/vistas etc., and to have a bit of fun. The rules as they exist are published over in our flickr group. I’m afraid you’ll need to be a flickr member to take part, but it doesn’t cost anything so grab your camera, run outside and start snapping!

The best photos will be published on the BritBlog site in a new, very special little section

^*I know the name isn’t great, but I couldn’t really use the title “A Picture of Britain” seeing as the BBC got there first… Anyway, forget about the name and start taking photos!

Massive Splog Hunt: Your Help Needed!

I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone how much of a pain spam blogs are. They seem to clog up everything to do with blogs, despite the best efforts of many people to stop them. BritBlog is no exception, and despite regular manual checks by myself and Nancy, I know we still have many, many spam blogs still listed in the directory.

So I was hoping for a bit of a favour…. At first I thought we could have a one day or one week ’splog hunt event’, but the sad fact is that this is an on-going challenge. It would be really great if you could browse some of the directory (perhaps blogs from your own location) and check out some of the blogs listed. If the blog is spam (or dead), just drop me an email to say so. The email should include the URL of the blog (as listed in the directory) and any other information you think is relevant.

If you could spend perhaps 15 minutes or half an hour checking some random blogs I’m sure we’ll be able to make a decent dent in the number of splogs listed in the directory. And you never know — you may find some interesting new blogs listed while you do it!

I know this may not sound like the most exciting way to pass some time, but it will really help all of us in the long run. And if you tell me your name and blog address when you email me, I’ll try and work out a way to give you a bit more publicity in return as a way to say thanks.

As always, if you have any thoughts, questions or suggestions, please do get in touch.

Thanks!

[tags]britblog,splogs,spam blugs,spam[/tags]

Happy St. George’s Day

That time of year already? Time flies! Anyway, if you celebrate it, then HappySt George’s Day!

[tags]st george,st georges day[/tags]

Blog charts coming back in house

The Blog Ranking service, Technoranki, is going to be brought back in house and reflect only ‘top’ British blogs. I’m taking this move to free up more time for BritBlog, which is really the site I need to focus most attention.

As Technoranki never opened up its doors to none-BritBlog members this shouldn’t cause any issues. It will make management of the blogs much easier (as I won’t have to track spam blogs in two places), and it will mean the problem of getting new blogs added to Technoranki will be gone.

It also means that the charts will only reflect British Blogs, which has to make it of more interest to all our members!

This change will take time to plan and implement, so keep an eye out for updates here. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to leave a comment below or drop me an email.

» Full announcement and more details.

The blog is back!

I’ve finally upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress, so sorry for having it offline for such a long while. I think that the XML-RPC interface to the blog was being hammered a bit by spammers which was having an adverse affect on the stability of our web server. I was a little concerned about a security issue with the WordPress code too, so felt it best to take the site down for a while.

So where are things at the minute? Well I’m sorry to say they’re pretty much where they were a month ago: I’m still waiting for our new server to be built and configured, and for some database work to be done for the new code. All in all very disappointing.

On the plus side the Spring has well and truly sprung, and we’ve had some fantastic weather over the Easter break. Hope you all had a great time and didn’t eat too much chocolate

I think we should be thinking about having another blogmeet soon – any suggestions for a location? I heard a mention of holding one in Southampton…

Server upgrades

Just to let you know that our hosting company swapped out the faulty memory on our server a couple of days ago, so with luck this will improve system uptime. Sorry for all the recent outages – I hope this hasn’t impacted anyone too much.

In other news, we took delivery of a brand new server to replace the existing britblog one a couple of days ago. The new box still needs to be built and tested and it will be several weeks before we pop it in the rack up in London. Still, it’s a step in the right direction. When this box goes live we’ll have a slightly improved version on the code running too, ready for some nice new features to be rolled out over the next few months.

Sorry this is all taking such a long time, but we’re slowly edging forwards.

In case people are wondering if I had vanished off the face of the earth, I recently moved home which has meant I’ve been offline for the last couple of weeks. Nancy has done a great job keeping on top of the new blogs, and I’ll try and get around to answering all the emails that have built up as soon as I can.

In the meantime, I hope you all enjoy this wonderful weather!

Progress

Hey all, just thought I’d give those of you that are interested a little update — it probably seems like nothing is going on around here these days!

As I’ve alluded to many times in the past, we’re in the process of re-writing the site. As well as re-writing lots of the website code, we’re also moving to a new database platform and this process isn’t without it’s problems….!

Anyway, things are progressing well and we should have an interim release for you soon. Although it won’t fix some of the niggley problems with the site (like only having one blog per user), it will introduce a few nice new features and should be a lot faster: a good step in the right direction.

As always, thanks to Nancy for keeping on top of the new registrations – we really would be in a quagmire without her.

I’ve got lots of emails sitting in my inbox at the moment with various queries about the site (“why was I rejected?”, “can you reset my password?” etc.), and I’ll get to these as soon as I can. I’ve got even more than usual going on at the moment so please bear with me.

[tags]britblog,update[/tags]

Season’s Greetings!

Just a quick note to say Season’s Greetings to all our members. I hope you have fun, however you choose to celebrate. here’s to a happy, healthy 2007! Cheers!
[tags]christmas,new year[/tags]