Monday, February 06, 2012

Admin Note, Especially for Australians

I've noticed in the statistics over the past few months a pretty heavy uptick in people ending up at http://branemrys.blogspot.com.au, which is the Australian version. It usually happens, of course, with Australians (sometimes New Zealanders -- given the Kiwis I've known, they probably find being lumped in with the Australians irritating, so I hope it's not a constant thing) who get here by Google, but also at least sometimes from elsewhere.

This can affect the reading of the blog, especially if you comment here -- comments show up on the .com edition, not the .com.au address.

If it keeps redirecting you to http://branemrys.blogspot.com.au no matter what you do, you should be able to get around this by adding a No Country Redirect. It's easy enough to do; just type in

http://branemrys.blogspot.com/ncr

This will always get you to the American version, which is the One True Version, at least of this blog.

Google is doing this with Blogspot because of increasingly specific laws for various countries regarding internet content. It will become more common in the future, and will certainly spread out from Australia, so it's worth knowing even if you are not Australian.

UPDATE: Also, additional testing shows that at present any comments made on .au posts disappear into oblivion. I'll look into seeing if I can get around this without going crazy.

UPDATE 2: OK, even further experimentation shows that comments put on the .au page do show up in the comments thread RSS -- but as far as I can discover, nowhere else. This is a problem; I'll still be looking into this.

UPDATE 3: Although I only occasionally get readers from India, it looks like it's an issue for India, as well (and checking my logs I find that this is certainly happening, although I hadn't noticed it before). I wonder if Google keeps a list of which country redirects they are currently using? The article linked to by the link mentions Brazil, Honduras, and Germany; I don't get many Brazilians or Hondurans, but I do get people from Germany, and haven't noticed this happening with them yet. Vikram Johri at the link wonders if NCR will last; if it doesn't, it will be a pain. But it probably is not going to last forever.