If you blog with Google’s Blogger and don’t have your own hosting, you get a blogspot.com account name. This domain used to be blocked in China until this summer, but then the government suddenly unblocked it. I was happy because before that I often would get the ‘page not loading’ error message, when weblinks pointed to a blogspot weblog. This would now finally be over.
Until about a week ago that is, when blogspot stopped working again. I was thinking about calling the domain blockedspot, but this morning I see that all my RSS feeds from these accounts are suddenly filled with new posts. So I checked it, and it seems blogspot is again available in China. A mistake from the Great Webfilter or was the re-blocking just temporarily? We’ll find out soon.
You suggest that when a website or weblog is blocked in China, you cannot read it on your rss-feeds, Marc? That is strange, since my rss-reader (bloglines) is not only a fantastic way to organize my online reading, but it also presented me with the entries of blocked weblogs. Which one do you use?
My blogspot domain has not been working for several days up to now and I don’t know why this is blocked by the government as you said, or is it just a simple server failure?
There are not many free blog service in English environment.
@Fons: Online RSS readers work as long as they are foreign services (such as bloglines), but I mainly use Outlook (Attensa) or Thunderbird to read all my feeds. Not only can I read them offline, but it’s nice to have both email and rss feeds in one application.
@Anonymous: blogspot was blocked again last week, that’s why you could not read your own weblog. I cannot answer why, there are government bodies that determine this. Best is to use your own domain and host it outside China (that’s what I do, this is also Blogger/Blogspot account)
Marc-First of all I want to say-how much I enjoy perusing your site. I have learned so much from them!
Secondly, I have had no problem seeing your site(through marc.cn)but, i have not been able to see mine(just blogspot.com-or should I say until I found anonymouse tip on your site). Thanks to you for
all of your tips on China and for the anonymouse tip!-
Wish I could have been with you all in Moganshan-sounded like a blast!
kathy-Shanghai since August 2006
@Kathy: glad you learned something from the blog! The Moganshan weekend was great, but also without a party it’s a great place to visit. Will check out your blog – through anonymouse of course 🙂
@Kathy: just looking at your blog pictures, did I see Hans Moleman in there is or is that someone looking exactly like him? I tried to post a commen on your blog, but it did not work due the proxy server.
me too, my blogspot its blocked i dont know why