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bla.st news - no more countries!

We've made some big subtle changes to the way bla.st works. Previously we had 40 different homepages, one for each country. They were identified by the subdomain eg. nz.bla.st for New Zealand, and us.bla.st for the United States. The whole site now works only under the bla.st domain, any subdomains are redirected, including the www.bla.st domain.

For advertisers this means you no longer need to choose which countries to display your cards to. For casual browsers, the site will look exactly the same except now you will see all cards, not just those for your country. Also anything.bla.st now redirects to bla.st

If you have existing location specific cards on bla.st, it would be a good idea to make sure you have the right locations listed as categories.

So why have we done this? For a number reasons.

• Most cards placed on bla.st were being submitted to all countries anyway
• Behind the scenes it's made things a lot simpler. We no longer have to keep track of how many cards are in each category in each country.
• People were linking to their a country, so most people weren't seeing the right country
• The site will rank much better in search engines with only one site
• The site won't be mistaken as a link farm by search engines
• Some pages, like the blog, had 40 different URLs even though the content was exactly the same
• Cards can still be organised by country using categories (aka tags), eg bla.st/new-zealand/.
• Using categories countries, cities, states, and regions can all be grouped together, not just countries.
• Social sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, andStumble Upon will work a lot better with one URL per page. Check out how many different countries are listed in del.icio.us.