Please help!!

OK, I’ve got a challenge for everyone!

Back in June, the site hit 2000 members. I wondered how many members we’d have by the end of the year, and started a little competition to see who could guess how many we would have by 31st December 2005.

Anyway, the deadline is looming and our numbers are way too low! I don’t want to be giving away a BritBlog mug to John Blackbourn who had the lowest guess at just 4150 (which is still almost a 1000 higher than the current member count), so here is the challenge: get more people to sign up!

Should we start a meme or something? I dunno, but if you could all mention on your blogs that we need more members that would be excellent! Thanks in advance, Mark.

BritBlog Shop Updated

I’ve ‘unified’ the stuff in the BritBlog shop, so I hope you all find it a bit more tasteful now… The stuff just has the logo and URL on it now, and none of the strap lines that used to be there.

It’s great that some of you have already ordered some stuff – thanks for helping to spread the word!

I’m sorry that the stuff comes from the USA, but I’ve not found anywhere in the UK that does this stuff. At least the exchange rate is on our side

If you place your orders now then you should get your gear before Christmas, so hurry up!

Our shop is here: http://www.cafepress.com/britblog

Some Updates

Just some updates about where the site is at the moment:

Map of UK bloggers

The tools I used to convert postcodes to Ordnance Survey grid references no longer works I’m afraid, so I’ve not been able to update this map for some time. Postcode data like this is quite expensive (read very expensive!) to buy, so we’ve had to make use of freely available data in the past. Do to various copyright issues this is generally rather hard to come by, which is why this feature is currently so out of date.

I’ll fix this (if and) when I get a new source of data…

Top of the Blogs

I’m currently working on an interesting new solution to this feature. The new Top of the Blogs feature really will be excellent (really!), and I can’t wait to tell you more about it. It is a totally new approach to this whole issue, and I’m currently working on a prototype with an old buddy, Jim Downing. With luck there should be more to tell you soon, so watch this space!

Gravatar

I’ve just added gravatar avatars to this blog, and I think I’ll add them to the directory blog profiles in due course too. It adds a bit of colour .

If you’ve not got a gravatar avatar, head over there and sign up now!

Exciting News!

How exciting! BritBlog has been nominated on to the shortlist for this year’s Best of the .net awards in the category Best blog.

Strictly speaking I wouldn’t say that we were a blog, but then neither are any of the other websites in the category…

Anyway, what are you still doing here? Get over there and vote for us!

Oh yes, and if you vote for us you will be in for a chance to win a Philips 37″ plasma WVGA-screen, a Canon EOS 350D 8 megapixel digital camera, or an Apple iPod Photo!