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):

1. Don't host on free blog providors. They get blocked. Got a percentage of your readership in China and don't want them to have a terrible experience through slow proxies, or allow them to be completely blocked from your website because they don't know what a proxy is? Server space is cheap, domains are cheap. Webhosts do promotions all the time, and example is here - $9.95 for a year's hosting with all the bandwidth you'll need. If your website is anywhere near a business or personal long term venture it's just amateur hosting on a free provider. Worried about maintaining search results and not losing any readers, Fili did an excellent write-up here about how to move from Blogger/Blogspot and Wordpress.com without losing any readers.

2. Don't be reliant on any third-party links. Two examples here: Feedburner and Flickr.

Feedburner: Do your RSS feed links look like this http://www.mysite.com/rss.xml or do they look like this http://www.feedburner.com/mysite. If they look like the latter, you are doing something wrong. You should be in complete control of your site and your RSS feed is part of your site.

Still want to collect RSS reader stats in an easy fashion? Simple – there are instructions for Wordpress, a plugin for Drupal, the principal remaining the same with other CMSs, that means a user saves the link to your site like http://www.mysite.com/rss.xml, but when they do so something called a .htaccess file on your server forwards the user to Feedburner every time they read your feed (the clever part is, Feedburner which updates the feed is not forwarded to itself as the .htaccess file 'knows' not to forward Feedburner, so your feed on Feedburner updates like normal). Doing something like this means users always save your URL in their feedreader, and if you want to change your feed provider to someone like Feedsky (unblocked – instructions on how to use Feedsky here) you can and your feed users wouldn't notice a thing.

Flickr: I get annoyed when I see the phrase 'to view photos on this site please install Firefox and the Access Flickr plugin'. It should not be up to a website owner to dictate how one views their site, it reminds me of days when IE was required for viewing virtually anything on the web. There is a simple workaround again, and the .htaccess file comes in handy. Basically, whenever your website transmits a link to download a photo from Flickr (i.e. display a Flickr photo on your site) it will be blocked in China, the Firefox Flickr Unblocker plugin works by replacing the blocked URL (web address) with the IP address of the server (which is not blocked). To do this on your website automatically, so your users don't have to mess around changing their preferred browser, stick a 'rewrite rule' in your .htaccess file, or if you don't know what this is, install the Wordpress and/or Drupal module to do this automatically.

I would disagree with Perry that there is no reason to complain, as censorship is an annoying thing, but there are simple workarounds to beat the censors at their own game.