Sunday 7 October 2007

Bi News Agency

A couple of years ago I bought the domain www.bimedia.org in order to have a non-BCN email address from which to send press releases about events like BiFest and the launch of West Yorkshire Bi Group. It seemed like a good idea to have a news source email address to differentiate things from the magazine and so forth, though I wasn't entirely sure what I would do with it after advertising the couple of things immediately before me at the time.

Two years on and I've just decided to renew the domain name. It's a blooming good URL - google bimedia and naturally it gets highly ranked. But also the project of a bi news source is starting to come good. The URL now takes you to a bi news Wordpress site, but that was still a bit too much of an isolated addition to the bi web.

I've been trying for some time to work out how that news feed could fairly-seamlessly and easily be integrated into people's web pages. That way instead of being a news site off on its own, BiMedia could keep lots of bi web pages looking fresh and up-to-date with the latest news about events and more. But the php coding was just way beyond my lapsed-programmer skills.

All that has now changed though - so here's to a three-year experiment in hosting a bi news site and encouraging people involved in the UK bi community to take up content editor accounts to get as much news from the bi movement on there as quickly as we can - and syndicated onto bi web pages automatically through the magic of RSS. Manchester Bis and BCN have already got the feed; I hope other bi sites will pick it up soon too.