Say it five times fast. Go on.
I just posted this over at Lost Laowai, and as much as I’ve made a commitment to not cross-post – I thought this was pretty useful and as I can’t seem to get all my readers here to be faithful readers there (despite having a bunch of new authors, great topics, a pretty design, free guppies for the first 100 visitors…) here’s the original post:
Last November I wrote a post with a collection of “tools” to help you get around the GFC. At the time of writing (literally within hours) Blogspot were released from their “blocked” status in China, and so there wasn’t much use for the otherwise useful PK Blogs site.
A few months on, my predictions of tides changing and it again being blocked have come true. I was slow to post about this because really… it’s just not very interesting anymore. The blocking and unblocking of Blogspot, Wikipedia, BBC News, etc., used to be mysterious, nefarious even. The validations of fears that the CPC was watching us. Sort of a 1984 meets 1989.
Now however, it’s just ‘life here’. It’s annoying, childish and … annoying. I visit a number of Blogspot blogs and this kinks my visitation rights. I am fickle about reading online and often can’t be bothered to go through a proxy service (like those mentioned previously).
That said, Ya I Yee, an interesting new Chinese blog (written in English), has a cool little trick to thwart the Wall seamlessly and visit all the Blogspot blogs you want (note, these instructions are for Firefox – which you should be using anyway).
The Blogspot blog block quick fix:
Use Notepad (or any plain text editor) to write a file with the following codes:
function FindProxyForURL(url,host){
if(dnsDomainIs(host, ".blogspot.com")){
return "PROXY 72.14.219.190:80";
}
if(dnsDomainIs(host, ".wordpress.com")){
return "PROXY 72.232.101.41:80";
}
}
Save the file as proxy.pac (note, be careful Notepad doesn’t add a .txt extension to the file) and put it in your root directory (usually C:\). In Firefox, click Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->Settings… fill the text below in the blank under “Automatic proxy configuration URL”:
file:///C:/proxy.pac
Press Reload on the right, press OK, and OK. Relaunch Firefox, and you’re done! Free to surf Blogspot (and the continually blocked WordPress.com) till your heart’s content.
Thanks a lot to Yee and Fermi Zhang for this script.
