mann thoughts » Blog Archive » I’ve been found out!
Colleague Michael Mann is discovering his inability to read or write to his wordpress.com hosted blog within China. I am a WordPress blogger — but host it on my own server and act as my own sysadmin — so apparently I am visible within the country. The good WordPress folks at Automattic provide an excellent service, but for any blogger trying to work within the Great Firewall … forget about it.
When I posted that I figured out how to read blocked blogs within China — and then coyly said I wasn’t going to divulge the secret — I didn’t mean using IP anonymizers and other backflip moves. The secret is an acronym, has three letters, is the essence of blogs, and can be aggregated in a feed reader like Bloglines. Directly accessing a blocked blog is a futile effort.
I’ve been in China for a year now, and it seems like WordPress.com was blocked just around Feb. 2006. I went home on January and came back February to find out that it’s been blocked. I’ve used Newsgator ever since to read blogs… although I can’t post on my WordPress blog though, which sucks. =(