What has happened to Le Taurillon, the once active and alert online magazine for EU citizens in French, and the hub for articles in English, German and Italian sister publications?
According to Bloggingportal.eu, the latest blog post on Le Taurillon was published more than two weeks ago. Taurillon on Twitter is silent too, with the last tweet on 8 July 2010.
When you try to access the webpages of Le Taurillon, you are met by a Forbidden notice.
The new German blog Treffpunkt.Europa, which seems to have been in existence only since 19 July 2010, mentions technical problems at Taurillon and posted a similar explanation a week later.
Are the problems technical or financial, or has the production and translation network of Young European Federalists (JEF) broken down?
It would be interesting to know what has happened to Le Taurillon and its English and Italian sister publications (ezines or blogs), which have been an important part of the European online public space. Naturally, explanations about the prospects for their resurrection are as eagerly awaited.
Ralf Grahn
P.S. It is easier to understand a language than to use it correctly, and as Eurobloggers we should promote interaction among Europeans. Grahnlaw has adopted a multilingual comment policy:
I do my best to read comments in Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish or Swedish, even if the Grahnlaw blog and my possible replies are in English.
Saturday, 31 July 2010
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I'm one of German editors and I've been setting up treffpunkteuropa on a new space on July 19th (one day after the taurillon's problem started).
ReplyDeleteIn fact treffpunkteuropa has been part of taurillon since November 2009. During that time we have written quite an amount of blog posts and we could welcome many new readers.
So the decision was firstly and most importantly to inform our reader's that we're still alive and secondly to provide our bloggers the means to continue.
Unfortunately we don't have access to the db so we couldn't migrate old blog posts to the new wordpress instance. That's something that we will do once taurillon is back up.
Martin,
ReplyDeleteThere must be a lot of people wondering what happened to Le Taurillon (in French), The New Federalist (in English), Eurobull (in Italian) and Taurin-Magazin (in German).
Perhaps JEF chapters, individual bloggers and active citizens could have been a little more informative about the problems and more ready to find alternative ways to publish content while waiting for the website to migrate(?)
Now only the indirect announcements by Treffpunkt.Europa seem to have reached a wider public.
Have I missed something, when after years of following Euroblogs I knew nothing about the Treffpunkt.Europa blog before it catapulted into stardom when the Bloggingportal.eu editors and readers voted for their favourite Euroblogs?
It would still be interesting to know what has happened to Le Taurillon and its English and Italian sister publications (ezines or blogs), which have been an important part of the European online public space.
Naturally, news on the prospects for their resurrection are as eagerly awaited.
I'd love to share more info on taurillon, eurobull and tnf. But I simply can't. I'd like to hear explanations myself, though.
ReplyDeleteAccording to what I've heard it's purely problems with the provider that stopped taurillon.org to work. Since then the team is looking for alternatives I guess. So there should be no fear that either of the websites isn't returning soon.
But what I can do is explain why you feel you didn't learn about treffpunkt.europa:
Taurillon started a German version in January 2007. It later called the segment "taurin-magazin". It was curated by the French editiorial team and only in November of last year JEF Germany's print magazine treffpunkt.europa joined taurillon changing the name of taurin-magazin (which is very weird in German) to treffpunkt.europa.
So if you've read the German version of taurillon in the past months, you've actually read treffpunkt.europa. The design only changed recently due to the mentioned migration to an ad-hoc wordpress installation.
Martin,
ReplyDeleteYes, we both would have liked to hear more about why Le Taurillon went down at took its sister with it.
However, even more important, I feel, has been the gaping hole opened up in the Euroblogosphere. I have missed the publications.
The reason is that their host - OVH - has put their website "on hold" because of the two possible reasons:
ReplyDelete1. A detection of high overload on their shared server (CPU, memory, etc.) caused by their website
2. A detection of hack of their actual CMS (Spip)
Source (French): http://guides.ovh.com/AlerteHackMutu
I know about this type of issues because I am hosting the great majority of my websites on this host.
In order to put back the website online you need:
1. To discover the origins of the high overload on the shared server, and possibly fix it,
2. And better secure the CMS.
Once done, you just have to chmod back the root folder to 705. Actually, this procedure is quite straightforward.
Source (French): http://guides.ovh.com/ReouvertureHackMutu
Personally, I would recommend the webmaster whether to migrate to another CMS (Spip => WordPress) whether to change of host.
Hope it helps.
Pierre-Antoine,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment about causes and options.
After writing the post, I got information through Twitter @vlentz that they are migrating to a new server, but still wait for things to be ready.
Hopefully Le Taurillon reappears soon.
Thanks for information. ;-)
ReplyDeleteIn any case, they should try better inform their readers / fans / followers in the meantime.
I am happy to help in case they decide to stay on OVH.
Pierre-Antoine,
ReplyDeleteI fully agree that JEF and Le Taurillon should have informed their readers using other available channels.
My blog post aimed at provoking better information and quick remedies, and I hope that the discussion continues until matters are running better.