BG Views Developer Blog

One of the biggest challenges in moving away from College Publisher has been the 10 years of archives we have had online. As I am sure you are aware, those were abruptly taken down in January.

Simply put, there was no other way to switch from their servers to ours.

We are working tirelessly to get the archive back online, and today I would like to share (a new) update on that. I sent out an update on our Facebook Fan Page on Feb. 8, and I wish I could say we have made progress since then.

Hit the jump to hear the (somewhat condensed) updated info.

I was just trying to find an example of our YouTube videos showing up in Google News. It did not take long, searching for "Obama Ohio" and look what came up.


"Sweet!"

I should have thought of this a year ago. What is the best way to keep updates on anything? Twitter of course. And what is the best To-Do list out there? 37 Signals Ta-Da List. So thanks to Twitterfeed and Action Streams, I now have a daily log of what I have done, and what needs to be done. Also handy as a running tally to show the boss.

Since Twitter is not an archive, it is not a Wayback Machine, so I will be posting week-by-week accounts here to this blog. Highlights here and all the super-dry stuff after the jump.

We re-launched bgnews.com on January 12, this is what got done in the first week publishing our own daily newspaper after the long nights of getting everything done for a smooth launch. Here are the highlights.

• Setup RSS 2.0 feed for MyBGSU (BlackBoard doesn't like Atom I guess)
• Started talks with Andrew Spittle at CoPress about our CP5 archives
• Added ability to embed photo galleries in articles
• bgviews.com domain finally under our control
• Categorized the issue indexes
• Got my carousel picker plugin working thanks to Byrne
• Met with MediaMate talking about national ads and online ads

I must say I am impressed as to how fast Google added us to Google News. I am less impressed that despite the fact that I submitted our site name as The BG News (just so happens to be our name) that we are known in Google News right now as "Bowling Green News."


This means my news sitemap XML file will not validate, because of the site name mismatch. So until Google gets around to answering my question, we will be known as Bowling Green News in Google News, and then when it is set to our proper name, I will have to change our news sitemap XML file again.

Nice of them to be quick about including us, kind of a pain in the ass they screwed up our name.

UPDATE: Good news! They got back to me today saying our name has changed. So we will see tomorrow once they pull our articles if the news sitemap throws an error.

I have an update about our little problem of missing about 10 years of archives from our site. Since leaving College Publisher in December, we have been patiently, eagerly, relentlessly waiting for our archives and users databases. This past Saturday College Publisher provided the archive database to us. Yea... don't get excited yet.

We have been testing the Wibiya Toolbar since June, and are happy with the results. The developers have been very open to our feedback and have even modified our toolbar to work directly with our Google Custom Search Engine. It has been great working with Dror and his crew, and are glad they have incorporated our feedback.

Although the closed beta was not exclusive (most beta requests were filled quickly) it is now open for anyone to setup a toolbar, so check it out.

A lot is new under the hood. First off they have a new CDN for the script, and new code to add to your web page. I can immediately see the difference in speed when loading the toolbar from the CDN script. The next big change is the default search widget is now fully extensible, and easy to work with. The RSS feed widget is extensible in this same way, too.

Lastly they have added a whole slew of new items you can put on the toolbar, and best of all, in my opinion, you can finally take off the "random" button - I always felt that was an eye soar.

Lastly, it looks like they finally fixed a bug they were having with Google Translate, where you would get a Google API error when you used the Translate widget.  Nice update guys!

The launching of a web site is a stressful one, but the re-launching of one can be enough to kill you. Lucky for me things went smoothly in the wee hours of January 12 (and I am not typing this from the grave).

I would like to say the transition away from College Publisher has been a smooth one, but it in fact has not. Just today the domain name was finally transferred into our account, and it is still not resolving all over the Internets yet. And we do not have our database of past archives, last I talked to CP it looked like I would have them by Friday.

So if you are just tuning in, the entire BG Views Network of sites is running under Movable Type, including The BG News, which was previously partnered with College Publisher. We are by far not the first school to leave College Publisher in recent months, and no doubt won't be the last.

But this post is not about College Publisher, it is about Movable Type, and how we are using it to produce a daily newspaper online.

It seemed like forever between the time MT5 was released in Japan at the end of November until it was just released in the U.S. We found out the day after, because of a security update to both MT 4.33 and MT 5, but they wouldn't tell us that.

Telling us it was due to "wanting more time for coordination of the release and associated documentation" was frankly bull shit. Sorry guys. There still is hardly any documentation, scouring FogBugz seems to have offered the best loot so far. MT5 was released 4 days ago, and I still cannot lookup information on mt:Websites tag or the parent/child/sibling modifiers, for example. The mt:BlogParentWebsite is another tag I would like to know more about, too.

Come on guys, I thought you were putting a big effort into developing better documentation.

It is hard to imagine, but I have been blogging for close to seven years now, and I have seen comment spam of varying degrees. It used to be pretty easy to spot. Services like Akismet and now TypePad AntiSpam are there to help - and they do - but even trained computers fail at finding spam. Both Akismet and TPAS have been failing me lately, let me show you why:

Forgive me for not reading this open letter from Mark Zuckerberg until late Friday. I don't login to Facebook as often as I used to, but more on that later. His letter on the further changes to Networks was written Tuesday, so I am sure this is old news to some. I assume Mashable has covered this by now (they have, but they glossed over the negative by-product of the long-overdue privacy changes Zuck announced).