Hmm, seems that a site I’m running is blocked by the Great Firewall of China, so 1.3 billion people are denied the opportunity of seeing it…. </irony> This concerns some people inside China, who would definitely like it not to be blocked! (It’s a business site, totally legit, with no objectionable content). I suspect it’s blocked because the site is running on WordPress, though hosted on a third party server, and ‘blog’ appears in a lot of the URLs (that being the directory the software was originally installed in).
Some research suggests that I can get my counterpart in China to apply for the site to be unblocked: Danwei mentions it here, linking to a site in Chinese (Google autotranslation here) which gives more information. Anybody else got any suggestions for getting unblocked?
It isn’t Trigram, is it the Kung Fu Blog? Or is this some third site you’ve gotten embroiled in? I get a lot of traffic from different country domains run by Google, I’m pretty sure I see .tw every now and then but I can’t recall seeing a .cn of late. I’d have to fire up Google Analytics.
I don’t think there is much you can do, generally the sites that are blocked don’t want the government to know who’s running them. It is all about potential, not what you’ve actually done. Blogs can be potentially a thorn in the side for the Chinese government therefore they have to be controlled.
The same can be true in the West too unfortunantly… In Canada there is talk of changing “innocent until proven guilty” to be “we can hold you without bail for some crimes if we feel like it until you prove yourself innocent”. I forget the ‘legal term’ for this, but it is due to an increase in gun crime and probably violent crime against women and children that have made the headlines in Canada over the last few years.
No, it’s a business site, not a personal blog. WordPress is pretty versatile, especially with all the plugins you can use to extend the basic functionality. Visits from China formed a big chunk of our traffic – maybe half. The site’s been running for a couple of years, and using WordPress since June, so I’m not sure why it suddenly got blocked in December.
[...] in China January 30, 2007 Posted by Emlyn in Tech, China. trackback Well, on December 8 2006 I discovered that a commercial website I maintain was inaccessible from China. There is nothing controversial or [...]
[...] more sinister… It seems that this week, the Chinese censors have been tinkering with the Great Firewall… and making a bit of a mess of it, to great annoyance of the business [...]
[...] 18 12 2007 I’ve had problems of my own with China’s Great Firewall (see here and here). That was an instance of the Firewall not working even on its own terms, since the site I [...]