Author: Ian

For a variety of reasons, we've moved bicon.org.uk and the BiCon sites from every year back to 1996 to a new server. If you can't see this post, your browser is looking at the old one 🙂

The previous one was set up in October 2017. As with this one, it's an imaginary PC (a 'Virtual Private Server') that's actually a slice of the memory, disk space and processing power of a larger one. It looks to the world like a real PC, but it's much cheaper to hire because the supplier can sell several VPSes running on the same hardware and it's also less fuss to for us run in several ways. (If something goes wrong with the real hardware, for example, it's not us at a data centre replacing stuff and it's reasonably simple for the supplier to move a VPS onto new real hardware.)

It's been the opportunity to do a few things that weren't done in 2015, including making the sites before then use TLS – they're all 'https' rather than 'http' now.

Interestingly, the three that gave the most issues were the oldest three that started off as WordPress sites: 2010, 2011, and 2012.

WordPress works by running some code on the server in a language called PHP. It interacts with a database to know what to display on any page. The code is the same between every site running the same version of WordPress: it's the contents of the database that make it different.

Well, that's not completely true: WordPress allows you to separate out the content of the website, the words and pictures, from how they look, the 'theme'. Themes involve some PHP code too, so sites with different themes do have some different code.

All but the most recent couple of years' WordPress sites have been converted, by a neat addon to WordPress, to 'static' sites. This cuts the time taken to show a site because there's no PHP and no database – all the webserver has to do is deliver simple HTML files. The way it was done means it's possible to go back to them being a WordPress site and on several, it was done so that links to the hellsite formerly known as Twitter have been changed to point elsewhere, for example, before making them static again.

The problems came because the original conversions to become static was done to those three websites some years ago and since then, various things have changed with PHP. What worked with PHP5 doesn't, it turns out, necessarily work with PHP8. And the themes that the organisers of those BiCons picked haven't been updated in many years, are all in PHP5, and include bits that don't run on the new server.

So they've had their old static code edited 'by hand' in a text editor. There are a couple of other sites where the conversion is not yet perfect, but they'll get there…

Want to know about the next one, and the one after that, and..?

Send an email to BiCon-News+subscribe@groups.io to join the announcements mailing list.

It's a low traffic list and you can unsubscribe at any point.

At one point, a new Twitter account was created for each BiCon, but in order to save everyone from having to remember to follow a new account every year, since BiCon 2014, a single @biconuk account has been passed from team to team. (A bit like Latimer, really!)

In 2024, a @bicon account was created on BlueSky, following the descent of Twitter into the far right following Elon Musk's purchase of it.

It's exactly four months to go, so what better date to open bookings for BiCon 2025?

When: Friday 25th July – Sunday 27th July
Where: Nottingham Girls' High School, Arboretum Street, Nottingham NG1 4JB

More details, and a link to book, at 2025.bicon.org.uk

[image or embed]

— BiCon (@bicon.bsky.social) 25 March 2025 at 21:36

The 'World Wide Web' was created in 1991. By the start of 1994, there were around a thousand of the new 'web sites' available (all those image-laden pages would surely never catch on!) and only around ten thousand by the end of the year.

Unsurprisingly, 1994's BiCon 12 didn't have one.

Jon Harley, one of the organisers of BiCon 13 in 1995, worked at Information Services for the University of Birmingham and used his account on one of their machines to have a page for the event at sun1.bham.ac.uk/j.w.harley/bi/bicon.html, but sadly it looks like no-one has a copy of that.

The somewhat more memorably named bi.org was registered by Nick Smith about a fortnight before BiCon 96. This was before Google (domain registered in Sept 1997) existed.

Nick put up a notice at the event to offer free space to bisexual groups and projects, and it became the main bisexual 'portal' site for things outside the USA. bi.org had a page with the final report for BiCon 96, then hosted the websites of 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 and at least the start of 2004's.

1996.bicon.org.uk now has that year's report. It's possible that there was a 'before' page somewhere – the person most likely to know wonders if it was on GeoCities but I have been unable to find it.

1997.bicon.org.uk has the two(!) pages of what was probably the first BiCon website hosted on another bi community domain.

1998.bicon.org.uk has that year's site, complete with the "we hope to have a written report with financial statement up on these pages soon" statement. I don't think that ever happened or, if it did, archive.org doesn't seem to have noticed. Note the option of having the registration form with or without HTML tables for people with browsers that didn't support those.

1999.bicon.org.uk now has the events 'way before' page, the main 'before' site and the 'after' site, complete with a couple of corrections to the HTML of the accounts page so the table displays correctly. It's missing the t-shirt photos (but I do have one of the t-shirts!) and the prices for those + assorted off site accommodation.

Thanks to Google still knowing about the original 'about' page rather than just the 'it's over' page, 2000.bicon.org.uk has a composite of the history of the site. Because the 'before' version was last changed between advance registrations ending and the event itself, there's no booking form or prices, and the reason that the 'getting to' page is called art.html is very probably that it was first a call for submissions for the Line By Line art exhibition that Gina did.

Jon Harley registered bicon.org.uk the day after BiCon 98. It hosted the websites of 2001 and 2002. This is years before Twitter (2000) or Facebook (2004, domain now used registered by someone else in 1997) existed.

2001.bicon.org.uk now has a composite of that site: when a page changed significantly, that's now reflected in a single page. It was the only BiCon site to have a 'splash screen', showing an image and getting visitors to click to see the real content. Some of the photos are missing from archive.org sadly, but it does mean we see the originally hidden comments for Atilla the Stockbroker starting ('The ever popular Atilla the stock broker (sic)') and finishing ('The no longer quite as popular Atilla the stock broker') his set that was unfortunately scheduled in the middle of the Sunday disco 🙂

The website for BiCon 2002, originally hosted at www.2002.bicon.org.uk, is now (fx: drumroll) at 2002.bicon.org.uk again! (Although the www.2002.etc address still works.)

In 2003, teams started a habit of using their own domain for their websites. Unfortunately, most of them were not renewed when the registration expired after the events and most of them were then 'squatted' by people wanting to take advantage of the existing links to the domain name. Fortunately, web.archive.org has most of the original content.

So 2003.bicon.org.uk has the www.bicon2003.org.uk site of BiCon 2003. Sadly, it is missing about half of the pictures. The 'what sort of bisexual are you' quiz was particularly wonderful and re-used next year. There were ten possible picture answers – whatever one it came up with would also say you should go to BiCon! – but only two of them are on archive.org.

2004.bicon.org.uk has that site. The original page was at manchester.bi.org/2004, but it soon moved to www.bicon2004.org.uk. Its FAQ says that the venue doesn't have its own internet access, but there was an 'Easy Everything' – an internet access shop from the same group as EasyJet – near by. This might make it the last BiCon not to have internet access on site.

BiCon 2005 was the first team to use a 'content management system', TextPattern, to make maintaining the site easier. Unfortunately, this makes duplicating its look much harder: even with the right CMS software (and sometimes only the right version of that) having the original source used to create the site would be needed to do it without lots of work. But 2005.bicon.org.uk uses another CMS, WordPress, to host the content of the original site.

(As an example of the squatting, after attempting to promote lesbian dating sites, the new owners of bicon2005.org.uk went on to pretend it was the website for the 'Building Industry Conference 2005' – yeah, right, a 2005 conference getting a 2005-name domain in 2010… – as part of boosting the Google ranking of related sites.)

BiCon 2006 used Plone, another CMS, to manage its www.bicon2006.org.uk site. While people are looking for a better copy, most of its content is at 2006.bicon.org.uk, with no attempt to recreate its three column 'menu on the left' appearance.

www.bicon2007.org.uk also used Plone. Again the recreation at 2007.bicon.org.uk uses two columns rather than three and none of the images in the original site have been found. Archive.org is sadly missing several sub-pages of the site and all the downloadable files too, including the booking form and programme booklet.

bicon2008.org.uk was the last site to be created 'by hand' rather than using a CMS. (As one of those responsible for it, I can't remember why it didn't use WordPress!) The domain still points to the site, but now does so by redirecting to 2008.bicon.org.uk for consistency with the others.

BiCon 2009 used Textpattern again. Because of how it works the dates of some of the news posts at its new home of 2009.bicon.org.uk are approximate and archive.org is sadly missing all the pictures and other files too, including the booking form and programme booklet.

The first year to use WordPress was BiCon 2010 on bicon2010.org.uk. Fortunately, archive.org's coverage of the site is not as patchy as it first appeared, so almost all of it is now at 2010.bicon.org.uk. There are some pictures and files missing, and despite finding the files for the original's look, a couple of differences in that.

All of the BiCons since then have used WordPress and their data has been passed on, which means that 2011.bicon.org.uk, 2012.bicon.org.uk, 2013.bicon.org.uk and 2014.bicon.org.uk have the relevant sites, exactly as the original, apart from the change in URLs and the banners for promoting the next BiCon.

BiCon 2015 went back to using bicon.org.uk as its host, so has remained unchanged at 2015.bicon.org.uk, and the latest site is of course at next.bicon.org.uk!