Google country specific redirection on Blogger has technical issues for third party widgets

IntenseDebate has just highlighted one of the big issues that arise from recent policy change at Blogger.

Google announced recently that Blogger hosted blogs would redirect to country specific domains in some markets.

This was done to allow for regional blocking of content based on local laws and regulations.

This change has resulted in many plugins and widgets breaking which relied on blog post links to remain constant.

IntenseDebate has mailed the users of their platform to migrate from their Widget functionality to template functionality to control the damage.

The widget relied on the post’s URL which would now change for different users based on where they are located.

The template based functionality is not dependent upon the URL and works fine with the new changes.

IntenseDebate developers said:

This update will unfortunately cause a major issue with our Blogger Widget installation. The good news is that Blogger sites using our Template installation are all set and will not be affected by this change. You don’t have to do anything, so kick back and relax.

The not-so-good news is that if you are using our Blogger Widget installation, you will need to switch over to our Template installation to ensure that everything runs smoothly. It really is essential that you do this. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t bother you. Don’t worry, we’re here to help and we hope to make this as painless as possible.