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.

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]

December already?!

Time flies when you’re having fun!

There are a few things to let you know, but I’m in a rush (got to get lunch!) so forgive my briefness:

Quick catch up

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the developments ‘behind the scenes’, so I thought I’d just post a short update for any interested parties.

As you may know, we’ve been talking about a total redesign of the site from the ground up since March (I can’t believe how time flies!). Sadly demands on my time (read “day job”) have held this up somewhat, but that’s not to say we’ve been doing nothing.

We got our second server installed in July, which has taken a lot of the load of our older server (meaning a more reliable service for you). This new server will also soon be running a new ping server and spider combination that we hope to be testing in the wild over the next few months.

So this is Phase 1. We will be able to keep an eye on all our member blogs and find out what everyone is talking about. Not only will this allow us to say what the British blogsphere is talking about at any point in time, but it will allow us to segment the British blogsphere by location or category – meaning a very local or niche view of discussions (blog posts) will be possible. Exciting stuff!

You’ll probably see a new design go live with this new functionality too. So that’s the easy bit.

Phase 2 will have to be a total re-write of the directory and membership code. The new version of the site will introduce so many new features that we’re going to have to start from scratch. We’ve been tinkering with this for a while now but it’s still a fairly long way off I’m afraid.

And what about Phase 3? Well we’ve still got loads of great ideas that we want to put in place which I’d love to tell you about, but it’s probably best for me to firm these up first

Finally, for any new members waiting to get their blogs approved, please continue to bear with me. The queue is going down slowly, but has an amazing ability to grow back up if I have a day away! There are lots of spam blogs in the queue which aren’t always easy to spot, so blame the delays on them if you want to moan. Thanks for your continued patience.

That’s about it I think. Have I missed anything? If anyone is interested in a Christmas blogmeet in London, please let me know. And to make sure you keep up to date with any news from us, please consider either subscribing to our blog RSS feed or to our daily blogmail service (daily digest, only sent out when there is something new to send).

[tags]britblog,ping server,spider,christmas blogmeet,update[/tags]

Blog backlog back

Should that be backblog? Bit of a tounge twister either way, and a pain for everyone I’m afraid. We’ve got a huge backlog of blogs waiting to be reviewed I’m afraid – at the moment there are over 500 blogs in the queue.

Appologies to everyone who is waiting for their blog to be listed; I’m working through them as quickly as I can!

[tags]britblog,backblog,arrgghhh![/tags]

Back from hols

Just a note in case anyone is wondering why I’ve not replied to email etc. – I’ve been on holiday. Yay! Am back now. Boo ! I’ll try and deal with email over the next few days – please bear with me.