I cannot access Youtube.

But what can one do? I don't care much for random questions about accessing a randomly blocked website, I care about how to run a website seamlessly.

I must expand on this in the future, but for now a quick synapsis: blocking of websites occurs across many countries:

The US, often held up as an example of a bastion of free Internet access occurs not so much from the consitution, more from the 'common carrier' status of telecom networks in the US - in short they carry stuff, who knows what they carry, but not filtering (supposidly) what is carried also means they cannot compete by charging different rates for different customers. [Of course different connection speeds, latency, etc, can get different rates, but the key point is Common Carriers are not allowed to filter stuff for different levels of service.]

In China, filtering happens. There have been cases brought to court about filtering not being consistent with the law. These cases, to the best of my knowledge, are undergoing appeal (having been heard) or have been rejected (with the plaintiff going to a higher court - all cases I know of undergoing appeal for hearing in the higher court also).

In China blocking happens. A block is different from a filter. In a filter the contents are checked to be compliant. In a block all traffic to a domain name and/or server is stopped. The recent Flickr block is an example and the seemingly new Youtube and Delicious blocks are also an example of this type of block. [Note the Flickr.com domain name was not blocked with the recent Flickr block, rather the URLs of the servers were blocked (while the IP addresses were not blocked, allowing even really really really lazy webmasters to keep serving Flickr photos).]

So, enough discussion, and please don't send emails to me asking for a proxy to access stuff because I will not give it to you. Pragmatic:
Want to serve embedded videos on your site that are accessible from China? Upload them to Youku.com, tudou.com, or one of the many YouTube clones in mainland China. Note that Youku is very slow from outside mainland China, so smart people may like to use a quick Javascript function to first determine whether or not the visitor if from outside mainland China, then show the version they uploaded to YouTube or YouKu depending upon their location.

Basic principal, as always, adjust your website to fix your users' needs. Don't expect your users to download Firefox and any number of dodgy extensions when it is easily fixed server side.

Will post tomorrow with useful code/patches/modules/hacks for the imposed pain. I can't wait for the Peoples' [sic] Congress to be over.

International domain names are coming. I've covered this briefly before but it is time for an update.

On the 9th of October, ICANN announced the launch of a test internationalised TLD. In short, .test has been translated into 11 languages. TLD is the part of a domain name after the final dot. On the 15th ICANN will open example.test - a single website accessible in a variety of languages. Both example and .test will be translated into the 11 languages.

This is interesting, and not soon enough in my opinion. International domain names are already available. The bit before the dot being internationalised is not unusual, but the bit after the dot, so for example youtube.com and youtube.公司 actually resolve to the same website hasn't been done yet, well not properly.

Background

To understand the current situation properly, we should look at a few examples and understand some of the techy side.

Perry Wu, just wrote a story complaining about bloggers in China: “Bloggers in China complaining recently about their inability to access weblog tools and websites like BlogSpot, Blogger, Wordpress, and FeedBurner should shut up or put up.” Harsh words indeed, but his tone cools further into the article and I actually agree with him on a pragmatic level, it is often quicker to solve the problem than complain about it.

Below is how to stop Net Nanny being a headache (I have written about all these things before, but here they are in a simple package):

Feedburner has been blocked, according to this post on Ya, I Yee.

Of course, this only affects offline and hosted-in-China feed readers. No matter, perhaps time to switch to Feedsky.

Also, see here and here.

Your website has been blocked. It needs unblocking, first you need to ask ‘why has my website been blocked’ then you need to work out ‘how to make it viewable’.

Ever see this? Nightmare!

There's Feedburner, there's Feedsky. Which one should you use?

I've commented before that it's a little silly to stick to one provider without a get-out option: Don't Get Burned. It's much better to take advantage of Feedburner's service via a 302 redirect, so should anything ever happen to Feedburner one can switch RSS providers and users will never have to update their bookmarks, and never notice otherwise.

Ryan, inspired by Kim had the idea of a group writing project: If I Knew Then What I Know Now. Nice idea, should help a few others out; here is my spin, Internet related: