Flickr and GFW Fix

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:45:15 -0700

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.

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Flickr and GFW Fix