Last August, I blogged about the untimely demise of the China blog A Modern Lei Feng. I argued, in that post, that while China's Great Firewall was indeed a nuisance, it was still just that: a nuisance. I also argued that with a little time and effort you could, as armies of lore did with the real Great Wall, find a hole and go through. I was speaking then through my most recent experience of living for two years in China from 2004 to 2006. In the intervening years, I've been back to China frequently but nothing long term and nothing that would really require the use of the Internet as I do in the States. But times have changed.
I'm now back in China for quite possible a long "tour of duty" and since I arrived I've had to use the Internet as I do in the US and what I've found is that the Great Firewall has been upgraded. Whereas before the GF was used more like a blanket to cut off, whole-scale, access to the World Wide Web … today the GF in more intuitive and interactive. It allows access to the wider web while pinpointing sites that are "bad" and blocking any ability to access them. In the past, one would be able, via a proxy server or a change of your DNS address, to get over the wall and all the glory it brought. But today, with the new and improved GF, when a site is on lock down, it is almost impossible to access that site without some outside help such as access to a VPN or maybe a company's intranet. The problem there is that not everyone here has access to an intranet that can breach the wall, nor does everyone have the cash to pay for a VPN, nor (from an expat or tourist point of view) will one be in China long enough to justify paying for a VPN. So for those that are without means or time, the web as seen from China is strictly through the eyes of the government ad their Internet censors.
That perspective has gotten better since '04 and '06. Now such sites as the New York Times, BBC and the Washington Post are rarely if ever blocked. On the other hand, sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed (and amazingly ESPN) have been vanished.
But you would expect that. What you (and I) would not expect is that a simple little blog like this one would also be blocked. I mean I doubt my regular readership tops 10 people. But clearly someone in that group feels that this blog is "bad" enough to be blocked. Amazing and I must admit, a bit flattering . But mostly, it's been annoying. Since, I've returned I have had a lot of thoughts, reflections and comments that I've wanted to post but my ability to do so has been totally denied. As the days went by and my ideas for posts dissipated like steam off a freshly made mantou, I was at wits end. It was getting to the point where, like the writers at A Modern Lei Feng, I was considering … no it wasn't that bad but I was at least considering going on hiatus. Then along came Posterous. Posterous was suggested to me by my social media guru Boycaught back in July. But while in the US, I never saw a need for it as I already had a blog and could freely access it when I wanted. But after about a month of futility in China of trying to post, something caught my eye in an article or post from another blog that you can e-mail a post to Posterous and that they can in turn pubish it to your blog. Blap! It suddenly all made sense: e-mail is not blocked in China; you can post to Posterous by e-mail; posts to Posterous can be pubished to your blog. Why didn't I think of that before. So tentatively I e-mailed a post on October 7th. It worked and the rest is history.
My main reason for writing this post, was in the hopes that it may help those that are being denied access to their blogs while in China. It is a simple, neat means to give you access. One issue to consider though, is that Posterous is also blocked in China so you'll need to set up Autopost access to your blog before you get to China or use a VPN or company Intranet to set it if you are already in China. Below is the directions I cribbed of the Posterous website for setting up posting to your blog (or other services such as Facebook or Twitter).
How to set it up
You can setup all your Autopost sites at http://posterous.com/autopost
- For most sites, simply provide your username and password.
- For Blogger, you will need your Blog ID. You can find that by following these directions.
- We support both wordpress.com, and self hosted Wordpress sites. If you host your own Wordpress installation, make sure to enable XML-RPC. To do this, log in as admin, go to Settings, then Writing.
- We autopost to all blogs that support the Metaweblog API.
How to Autopost
The username in the email address determines where your email gets Autoposted. The username is the part of the email address to the left of the "@" symbol.
Normal posts created by emailing post@posterous.com autopost to all your other sites. You can also specify where you want to post via the email address you send to.
You can email to specific service types on your account. Do you want to update your Twitter but not your Facebook? You can do that.
You can use the following service names to email to: twitter, facebook, flickr, picasa, blog, blogger, tumblr, youtube, vimeo, friendfeed, delicious, laconica, identica, livejournal, plurk, shopify.
Do you have multiple sites of the same type? For example, do you have two Twitter accounts but you only want to autopost to one of them? Email #text@posterous.com to send only to sites where the url contains that text.
Posted via email from tbch’s posterous