Blogmeet?

After the success Gordon has with his Scottish Blogmeets, I’m thinking it’s about time we all had one!

So anyone fancy a beer? I’m based in South London/North Surrey, so London will probably be the easiest venue for me, though there is no reason why we can’t have them in other locations. And now the weather is picking up we can sit outside and enjoy the sun!

So we need some suggestions for dates. I was thinking that one of the non-bank holiday weekends of May would be good, so the 13th/14th or 20th/21st. What do people think?

Update: Date settled on is Sunday May 21st. Venue will probably be near covent garden.

Update: The Blogmeet Plan is published.

Bumped from 22 Apr 2006

St George’s Day

Happy St. George’s Day to all those that celebrate the it! Saint George is the patron saint of England, so I guess my words are really directed to the English Bloggers out there. However, people from Aragon, Catalonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, Germany, Greece, Moscow, Istanbul, Genoa and Venice may also be celbrating this day, along with soldiers, archers, cavalry and chivalry, farmers and field workers, riders and saddlers, and he helps those suffering from leprosy, plague and syphilis…

Interesting stuff! More about this St. George can be found on the BBC web site and over at Wikipedia.

(Image taken from Wikipedia, distributed under the GPL).

The backlog is here again!

Just a quickie to everyone waiting to have their blog checked. I’m sorry but we’ve got quite a backlog at the moment – it’s a bit of a combination of spam, very busy work, and our star editor Nancy is currently offline.

I’m getting through them as quickly as I can, so please do bear with me. You will get an email as soon as I’ve checked your site, so no news is good news in this case!

Blog Purge

So far we’ve had no automated system for performing an on-going review of blogs listed in the directory. We are aware that there are blogs listed now that perhaps shouldn’t be – for example blogs where the web site has gone/moved, and blogs that are no longer being updated.

However, I’m hoping to do a one off automated survey of our member blogs over the next few weeks in order to higlight (and purge) these junk entries. I’ll be looking for 404’s and redirects to start with, but also the presence of XML/RSS feeds on the pages, and the age of the entries within them.

Before we start on this, can anyone else think of any other purge criteria we should take into account? We’ll email anyone whose blog we’re about to purge, but I’m really keen to cut out some of the dead content from the directory before we move to the new platform.

Any thoughts?