After six years looking after the technology it was with some trepidation I waited for the BB07 site to go live.

It's always tough to walk away from a project that you've put so much sweat and sleepless nights into.

One of the hardest things for me was knowing that my content management system was going to be retired and it was going to move to a new software platform.

The worst thing for me was going to Bigbrother.3mobile.com.au and seeing this: 

Not only wasn't it working, it wasn't even using IIS any more!

When it did come back... it wouldn't let me in (maybe it knew who I was ... Big Brother is always watching after all!)

Reading reports on Behind Big Brother (BBBA) about problems with membership details and logins I had to wonder if they were missing me and my system - though the crew (you know who you are) probably were not missing my sense of humour and demands for chocolate to get anything done ;)

Luckily I was able to explain in the BBBA forums that credit card details were secure... heading off one crisis I hope. Even though the registration page wasn't showing a padlock the actual form was within a secured iframe. Not my preferred way of doing it (because the browser doesn't show the padlock and reassure the visitor) but still safe.

Talking to the folks back in Aus they're working through the teething problems and I think it's all going to come together pretty soon.... this is their first 24 hours live so they're probably learning a lot of hard lessons very fast!

Here's hoping BB07 becomes a season everyone talks about for the right reasons ;)

Update: Saw the nicest comment from a BBBA user today - after all the grief they've given me the last 6 years this made me smile (I've actually always been really glad of their passion and bug testing skills):

Sadly, even for a lot of chocolate, beer and coffee we'd probably not be able to get the old site up and running sooner than these guys will get the problem resolved... after all, I'm not even in the country any more