Thursday, March 12, 2009

I Can See My Blog From Here!

If you've been reading, you'll know that I have been able to POST to this blog, but haven't actually been able to read it. The only way I can see it is by employing a handful of weird and time consuming work-arounds.

I'm happy to announce: It took a week, but my blog is finally available for Chinese consumption.

I'm not exactly sure what limitations on internet use really exist here and I'll avoid certain "buzz words" in this post to make sure that my site doesn't attract any attention. For the most part, there are only a handful of sites I've discovered that I can't actually visit. Most seem to be political in nature, including many from the US. Those of you familiar with the issue also know that there are a few specific topics that are not looked upon too highly here and, as a result, are not accessible.

This whole blog experience has really made me curious about the process of allowing or disallowing a site to be viewed. Best I can figure, the ISPs (internet service providers) are almost all state owned or at least subject to very high regulations. As a result, one thing they do is update their DNS (domain name servers) very slowly. A domain name server is the service that translates a domain name (like www.mybeijinglife.com) into an ip address (the actual numeric location of the website). This delay would theoretically allow whatever manual or automated review of the websites content to take place. If the site passes, its added to the DNS and becomes accessible. If it fails not that many Chinese will be visiting that particular site.

This may not be exactly how it happens. If anyone knows or has a better idea, please enlighten. I'm just happy that I can actually SEE the stuff I'm putting online!