Blogging in China

Blogging in China is a pain. Well, it can be at least. The Great Firewall of China works on several levels, sometimes scanning data passing through your connection and causing it to timeout if it doesn't like what it sees and sometimes just blocking entire IPs all together.

One of those blocked IPs is Blogspot. You can get to blogger.com, but you can't necessarily login and edit your blogspot page. You can use a proxy service like Anonymouse to get around it, but it doesn't work so well when you need to edit a blog page (i.e. you don't really want anonymous people editing your webpage). Fortunately, as you can you see, I'm still able to edit this Blogspot page.

More on the flip.

In order to get around the Great Firewall, I first tried using a program like Ecto. Ecto allows me to edit my blog offline and then sync changes through a XML-RPC connection. For some reason, although I can't edit my page via the normal HTML feeds, XML-RPC works just fine.

However, Ecto only allows me to edit posts, not edit all the other options on my page (e.g. layout and design). So the next thing I did was to try using a proxy server. The idea behind a proxy server is that instead of establishing a direct connection between my computer and a particular website, all data is routed through an intermediate first. Therefore, while the Great Firewall may block a particular website, it doesn't necessarily block a particular proxy. This allows me to access that website via the proxy. And finding a proxy isn't all that hard. All you have to do is Google "public proxy".

The problem is that while proxy servers can hide the identities of the users on both ends, they don't necessarily encrypt the data passing through. Therefore, the Great Firewall is still capable of scanning the content of data passing through the proxies, and, if it doesn't like what it sees, will block off access to said proxy.

For me, that meant an attempt to update my Blogspot template also meant me changing my proxy every few minutes. Use proxy. Connection dies. Find new proxy. Rinse. Repeat. And given how slow some of these proxies are (some of them are located in countries pretty far away), it became a pretty frustrating experience. Add in the fact that several proxies have their own "protection" software that keeps you from accessing certain sites (my guess if that some of these "public" proxies are really servers used by corporations that don't want their employees wasting hours on Blogspot), and it gets real tired real quick.

After about an hour of this, I finally got a decent connection and was able to make the minor template changes I wanted. But when I went back to look at my proxy settings, I had forgotten to check off proxy access and was actually using a direct connection to edit my Blogspot page. Maybe I made a mistake earlier about not being able to login via blogger, but my guess is that the Great Firewall suddenly decided to ease off what it was doing to make my life so difficult. In any case, I was left in the strange situation where I was able to edit my page via blogger but not able to actually see it (without a proxy) via Blogspot.

And I suppose that's the most annoying thing about the Great Firewall. Maybe it's just me and my limited knowledge of how the Internet works, but the firewall seems ridiculously inconsistent. Why block Blogspot.com but not Blogger.com? Why shut down a particular proxy but not shut down a list of proxies? Why am I even allowed to use a proxy service like Anonymous in the first place? Maybe it's intentional. The point of the Great Firewall isn't necessarily completely block access, just to annoy the crap out of the average user.

[tags]Blogging in China[/tags] [tags]Blogging[/tags] [tags]China[/tags] [tags]Beijing[/tags] [tags]Blogger[/tags]