Sunday, May 17, 2009

Blogger blocked

A blog less wknd due to several reasons:

-Blogger has been blocked and although I can use proxy servers it is slooooow and paaaaainful, especially for someone as impatient as me. I get a nervous breakdown (almost) when I have to wait for pages to load.

-Exam tomorrow. I've locked myself inside our flat with my books and trays of homemade cookies for the last few days. Yeah, I took the opportunity to be all housewifely and stuff... Actually went much better than expected even though I went out of ingredients and ended up using 3 different kinds of flours for my cookies (normal, whole wheat, and soy flour). I still cannot believe I lived my first 2 years in China without an oven
-Due to a wknd of Chinese characters and cookie eating, nothing interesting has come my way... so yeah, I thought I'd spare you the boring post.

But from tomorrow onwards, I'll be back on track! Let's just hope that blogger becomes accessible in China again sooner rather than later.

16 comments:

Brad Farless said...

Wow. Blogger got slammed with China's ban hammer huh? Nice how they blocked a whole service, probably because of what one person said on one particular blog. That's kinda overkill if you ask me.

What you could do is use a Firefox add-on called Scribefire. You could compose your entries in advance. I don't know if publishing via Scribefire would bypass the block or not, but it could be worth a try. Scribefire will let you upload photos natively as well, though you'll have to manually resize them. (I think the "large" setting is about 450 px in width).

Anyhow, good luck with that. I know how it feels to have stuff blocked, though it's nowhere near as prevalent here in SG. Here, they just block a handful of sites to express their "disapproval" of certain types of content to the citizenry, though viewing the stuff they block some of isn't illegal here.

agratefulheart said...

you can download a new browser called safari...it's faster when than mozilla and explorer specially when using a proxy site...

Chocolatesa said...

flowers=what grows in the earth
flour=what you use to bake with
:)

david1082 said...

Personally I prefer tulips, daffodils and cherry blossoms in my cookies. (Sorry, I couldn't resist making a joke about "flowers", since "flour" is what you meant. English spellings can be so obtuse sometimes.)

******************** Shanghai MiFeng said...

That is strange , my Wife also could not get to my Blog a few day's ago . Here I thought they must have a 30 day rule to view somebody's Blog without signing in as a Follower . Well anyhow , I did send her two URL's to try that way . I'll call her tonight and see if she got in .
Jonna , so your Kitchen smelled like fresh Cookies all day ? Can I give you my address , so you can send me some ? Yummm yummm , give me some .
Good luck on your upcoming Test .

Jackie said...

Glad you had fun making cookies! Just FYI though: a flower is a plant, a flour is a cooking ingredient. made me giggle a little bit thinking of you adding tulips to your cookie dough...

Veronique Renard said...

Do you know why blogger is blocked? Can you actually access my blog or website from China?

www.pantau.org
www.pantau2.blogspot.com

WoAi said...

Damn censors! I think it's because we're fast approaching that "sensitive" time, the BIG anniversary of June 4, 1989. It'll all be back to normal again soon I hope!

mtl said...

Jonna, you might want to think about migrating your blog to your own domain, using Wordpress.

You can export your old blogs and put it on the new wordpress blog(might take some programming)

This way you won't be blocked, and can even put ads and stuff on your blog (if you so choose).

Janet said...

Hmm, I wonder if that was just a technical glitch or if the govt was up to something. As a foreigner in China, do you find that you have to be very careful, politically speaking?

China seems to have made great strides but human rights violations are nowhere near gone: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2009/04/what-happened-t.html

What do you see, from the inside? Do the Chinese have freedom or does it dead-end at a point (i.e. criticizing the govt, freedom of religion)?

Jonna Wibelius said...

hey guys, I don't know why blogger is blocked but let's hope that Woai is righ and that it will be back to normal after June 4.

As for my flour -flower mix up, it's the Swede in me saying hello, claiming she simply did a typo... she's also yelling that she knows the difference between flour and flowers but who knows... ;)

Gigwriter -I don't feel I have to 'watch myself' over here... no. There are things u can and cannot write about here, however and seeing that this is not a political blog I am not feeling limited.

Pantau -cannot see your blog bbut your homepage works.

I don't have time to think about moving my blog at the moment (I also don't really want to, quite happy with what blogger has done for my blog! Naming me a 'blog of note' and everything....) let's first wait and see if this issue solves itself.

Veronique Renard said...

I am surprised you can actually see my website as I am blacklisted by China (I am Tibet activist) and for a while nobody from Mainland China could access it.

Thanks for checking.

Pantau

Hang said...

I need to sneak in!!!

Brad Farless said...

I think what Angelita is talking about is Safari 4 Beta. It's not really a new browser, well, the name isn't new anyways. It's the default browser for Mac OS X (Internet Explorer's Twin). It runs on Windows too. It's REALLY fast! It still has a few bugs, since it's a beta, but they just released a patch that fixed most of the problems as far as I can tell. Since then I haven't had a problem with it and started using it as my primary browser. I'm on a Mac by the way.

@dfvxc Actually, I have my blog hosted on Blogger and I can put up my own ads. I've seen quite a few good and successful blogs on Blogger. In Jonna's case, she might want to have her own domain, but that's a whole new can of worms. Maybe she doesn't know anything about how to do it? Plus, it's time consuming.

A little off subject, but I just wanted to point out that technically Singapore (also a primarily Chinese country) limits freedom of expression in political matters, but ... I don't notice it on a day to day basis. The country is clean, works well, and is probably one of the safest (if not THE safest) in the world. With a slight loss of "freedom" my wife can go jogging at 10 - 11 PM with headphones on and not have to worry about being mugged/kidnapped/worse. That's not something she can do in her home country (Philippines) or mine (USA). So, it's weird, but it's not obtrusive in any way.

Jonna Wibelius said...

Problem solved now, our old proxy works like a champ again and I can upload photos and access comment without any issues.. ahhh, what a relief!! :)

Diederik said...

Good to see, you managed to get photo's up your blog. Could you tell me which proxy you are using? Cause the one I'm working with now is not really working that well. Maybe you can email it me; djvdtoorn@hotmail.com

Thanks in advance!