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.

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):

I'm currently launching a, Dalian focused site, (not only me, but also Rick, Chris and Kerrilee) the site itself is a mix of 'open source journalism', revenue reciprocation, well, lots of things.

One of our aims is to make adding content as easily as possible, so RSS aggregation is a natural choice, and if you see our Dalian photos it's mainly RSS aggregation from web savvy photographers tagging their photos 'daliandalian', the RSS feed of this tag which we pick up.

The recent GFW block of Flickr was a pain, and while some people may be able to install the Flickr Unblockr plugin, many may be unable to do it. I ran across a solution thanks to this post. Basically, the URL is blocked by the GFW, but the IP address is not. This is an interesting strategy of the GFW in itself, as often IP addresses are barred rather than URLs.

If using Wordpress there's a pluggin here, if using Drupal install this module and edit the redirection according to the pic below.

It's nice if users are savvy, but many are not, so it's the webmaster's responsibility to make stuff work. The recent GFW Flickr block almost seems engineered to allow those informed enough to be able to avoid it, odd.

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.

Not China specific, but a useful feature other operators of Drupal sites may like:

On the right column on this site, there's a nice little box which allows someone to switch between 'recent news' and 'recent comments' without reloading the page, scrolling down, etc. It's a nice way to fit as much content into the screen as possible. Not unique to this site, I first saw some newspapers doing a similar thing years ago, and it's dead easy to do. A bit of Javascript is easy enough to do, but what about combining that with dynamic content. That's the real killer feature. Here's how:

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.

A part of a series measuring search behaviour in China, Searchengineland.com have released the findings of a study on Eye-Patterns of Chinee Internet users.

The results are interesting:

1. North American Internet Users focus on the top-right of an ordered list (in this case, a Google web search), while Chinese Internet users are less biased towards the top-left, and survey a greater number of results. [Of Yahoo, MSN and Google in North America, I understand Google users show the most concentration in the top-left of the screen.]

2. Chinese Internet users find what they want in around 30 seconds using Google, compared to 8-10 seconds for North Americans. Familiarity with processing Chinese writing is postulated as a possible reason for this (identifying keywords is slower).

3. With Google, Chinese Internet users took around 30 seconds to find a result. With Baidu that time was extended to 55 seconds. With Google most users didn't scan below the fourth listing, with Baidu they went to the bottom of the page. Baidu's paid listings, and time spent sorting-out the sponsored results, may be a cause of this.

When I saw this story about a virtual economy for China I thought "Uh-huh. That's interesting."

This morning I came across a new map website for Dalian. The company behind it, Aladdin Information and Technology don't just do this for Dalian, however. It's no usual map. It's 3D. Click on a building and a photo of that building appears For every building on the map, which is most of urban Dalian. [I understood some pretty funky maps were being worked on - an acquaintance in a Chinese IT company was working on some kind of walk-through map a while back - not live yet (perhaps never, it all seemed to fizzle)].

Here's a screenshot of the Dalian map:
Virtual Economy for China - Downtown Dalian

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Alex