Friday, March 16, 2012

Admin Note, Especially for German and Canadian Readers

I mentioned before that Google is restructuring Blogspot so that people from different countries are redirected to country-specific addresses; Australia and India were the first to undergo this treatment. New Zealand followed shortly after. I see from logs that this has now spread to Germany and Canada. I get almost no one from India or New Zealand, and only a small number of Australian readers, but Canada and Germany are third and fourth behind the U.S. and U.K. as source countries for my readers here, so this will have some effect.

The main effect, of course, is that Echo/JS-Kit comments, which I use, don't work well with this change; commenting is possible on the country-specific pages, but I have no moderation ability, the comments don't show up in my comments queue, and the comments don't synchronize with Blogger comments. I sent a tech support query to Echo about it, and the response I received was not only seven kinds of useless, it was pretty clear that they had no clue what I was talking about, and so I'm very sure they won't be fixing this issue at any point in the near future.

For the nonce, readers can get around this by using a No Country Redirect. Instead of going to the usual address, go to the following one:

http://branemrys.blogspot.com/ncr

That will keep you at the plain .com address. I could put code in the template to force NCR, but I'd have to do it for every single country Google does this for. And also the NCR is temporary fix: Google will certainly break it at some point.

In the meantime, though, if you are Australian, Canadian, German, or one of the very occasional Indians, please comment on the U.S. address (the plain .com) by using the NCR, if you can. If not, it's not a huge issue; I'll just probably not discover your comment for a considerable amount of time, unless I just happen to be nosing around the country-specific posts for your country at just the right time to catch it. (You also won't be able to see any comments on the plain .com version of the blog.)

ADDED LATER: Also, while UK readers don't currently seem to be undergoing forced redirect, I note that the branemrys.blogspot.co.uk version is already up and running, so it's only a matter of time.

ADDED LATER II: And it looks like it has started for the U.K., too. It looks Portugal is also one of the countries currently undergoing the redirect.

...And France.