Blocked Blogs

What's a blogger to do??

A few months ago I saw that my readership within country (China) suddenly went down. What a disappointment as my purpose is to help those seeking adventure in travel, shopping, and people in Beijing and Asia. Well, my VPN allows me to see blocked websites and post to blogspot.com without problem, but those who didn't have this "backdoor" could not. Soon I'll be moving to a new, hopefully problem-free (who am I kidding!) site. In the meantime, here are a few tips from Amanda Fazani from Blogger Buster, Posted on May 25th, 2009 and filed under Around The Blogosphere, Blogger, to access sites within China.

To read Blogger powered blogs from within China

For those wishing to read their favourite Blogger powered blogs from within China, here are a couple of possible solutions:

Translate Blogger blogs

Using Google Translate or Babelfish, you can circumvent the restrictions by viewing Blogger blogs in a translated page. This ensures that the URL of the site you are reading is based on a different server.

Choose to translate from Chinese to English (or whichever translation you prefer) and paste the complete URL of the blog you wish to read. The blog will then be accessible for you to browse recent posts or archives with ease:

Unfortunately this does not appear to work when attempting to access the Blogger home page, so this workaround will not enable you to post from the Blogger dashboard.

Subscribe to “banned” blogs using an RSS reader

It is also possible to read updates from your favourite sites by reading in an RSS reader. Sign up to use Google Reader, BlogLines or Newsgator (none of which appear to be banned in China) and add the URL of the default feed for the Blogger blog you wish to read. This will be in the following format: http://your-favourite-blog.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

You will then be able to read the latest updates from your favourite blogs, though unfortunately it may be impossible to comment on these posts since this requires access to Blogger servers.

Digital Inspiration also offers some interesting techniques to access banned sites from within China in this post.