I am pleased to advise that the BBC have agreed to cover the running costs of Island Blogging for 2010. No strings attached.

Carol, of old IBHQ, actually made the offer for last year but by then the costs had been covered by donations so I didn’t need to take up the offer. This year she has once again persuaded her bosses to stump up. Well done, and thanks, to Carol and to the BBC.

Look what can de done when they no longer have to pay Jonathon Ross!

I don’t suppose many of you wander over to the old IB nowadays so will not have seen the ‘final goodbye‘ from Carol.

The BBC won’t be accepting any further ‘contributions’ after 12th February and I assume that means comments as well as posts so if anyone wants to say a farewell to Carol (for t’was not she who shut it down) then it looks like you only have a few days to do so.

Early this morning (4th June) the IB site was attacked by a hacker (thanks to SarahMac and Jill for alerting me to the problem) but I have re-uploaded the affected files and it seems to be working again. The database was not compromised so all blogs should be fine but please let me know if you have any problems.

There were lots of security features in place but it looks like I am going to have to figure out more. The difficulty is to figure out how to exclude hackers whilst allowing full access to genuine visitors. Whilst I sort this out there may be one or two ‘outages’ so please be patient.

I cannot monitor the site 24 hours a day (although it feels like it!) so if anyone finds that the site is down at any time please let me know by email. Sometimes there will simply be general internet problems which will result in your browser saying the site is not responding but if you get through and find errors or find that you are redirected to another site that’s when I need to know.

The new Terms of Service are now in place and anyone logging in will be asked to agree to the terms as stated.

For those who haven’t yet logged in (or don’t need to) please see the Terms of Service page.

Let’s now all move on.

Youtube videos may now be embedded in your blog - for more information see View From The Helm. At long last you can get rid of those awful URL links.

As I have said on VFTH there is no Help tutorial yet and I may have to pull it if it goes wrong but I don’t think there will be any problems.

Get creative (but try not to make us all cringe too much!)

The Terms of Service for Island Blogging have now been completed and the site will be relaunched some time during the coming week. The site will be closed down for as short a time as possible to ensure that the necessary changes to the software can be introduced without problems. Once the site is back up you will be asked to accept the Terms Of Service.

It is not actually the TOS that require the shut down but the provisions which will be made for those who, either now or in the future, cease to become eligible for a blog on Island Blogging.

The eligibly conditions which up to now have been merely implied will form part of the Terms of Service and are as follows

Any person may request a blog on Island Blogging if they

• Are a permanent resident on a Scottish Island, or
• Own property on a Scottish Island in which they occasionally reside or which they wish to write about, or
• Are a temporary resident of a Scottish Island for a period longer than a normal holiday (e.g. on a work placement or sabbatical), or
• Are intending to move to a Scottish Island provided that they write only about their relocation plans until such time as they become a resident.

There will be those who don’t fall within these terms, or who might cease to be eligible in the future, and provision will be made for them to ‘keep in touch’. The options available are shown in the Help Tutorial Leaving Island Blogging. Island Blogging is probably unique in providing this continuity as a blog that falls outside eligibility conditions would most likely simply be deleted on a similar site. There are hundreds of Wordpress Multi User setups and the vast majority of these are run by Schools and Colleges. Once someone with a blog leaves, graduates, or moves to another institution the blog is deleted.

It is necessary for the integrity of Island Blogging for these terms to be strictly enforced in future but they must be read as part of and in conjunction with the full Terms of Service (which will be available shortly).

Events in recent weeks have shown that Island Blogging cannot operate without a stated set of terms and conditions that can be enforced and referred to in the event of any dispute.

Terms of Service for Island Blogging - based entirely on agreements used by the BBC and by Wordpress.com - have been drawn up and are ready to be implemented however I want to make provision for those who will be ‘displaced’ trhough the eligibilty conditions and that will take some time to implement as changes to the software are required. I expect that the necessary changes will be completed in a week or so and then Island Blogging will be shut down and re-launched with the new Terms of Service.

On a personal note I expect to be made redundant this week so Island Blogging will have little priority. If those who have caused all the unpleasantness in past weeks seek to continue their fights here then I will simply close the site straight away and re-launch it as and when time permits.

I’ve worked out (I think!) an automated system to send reminders once a month for those who haven’t written anything for the past 30 days or so, hopefully to encourage new postings and so we know that folk are still there. After half a dozen such reminders the system will send one saying that the blog will be archived if not updated as I can’t see any reason to have ‘dead’ blogs lying around. I may not actually do that - if there is interesting content then I’ll likely leave it for posterity - but some blogs only ever get one posting, or none at all.

Although I have tested this elsewhere I’ll never really know if anyone actually gets the reminders or whether anything has gone wrong. If you find yourself receiving strange emails from me, please let me know!

I’ll hit the button for the first batch shortly so be prepared (but if you haven’t logged in recently, you won’t be reading this anyway will you?)

I have added two new widgets that you might like to use to see which of your posts are the most read and who leaves the most commments for you. There are new tutorials on Help Me! to show you how to set them up.

If you want to see them working check out the sidebar on View From The Helm.

The sitewide feed now works fully in that you can now click on the RSS icon in the address bar of your browser and select from a feed for the front page or for the whole site.

The sitewide feed selection just above the updated blogs on the front page still works if you prefer.