Some countries on earth are trying their best to keep their citizens from accessing the Internet freely out of fear that ideas of freedom and liberty would spread like wildfire throughout the country. China, notorious for blocking websites has started to realize that its citizens were able to read all those forbidden writings by simply accessing the feeds of those websites.
After discovering this they decided to ban URLs starting with ‘feeds’, ‘blog’, ‘rss’ and probably a handful of other related words. Several of my readers from China mentioned to me that my feed was blocked in China as well but the website was not. So, they started visiting my website again.
If you want to check if your website or feed is blocked as well in China you can use the website test behind the Great Firewall of China to do so. Just enter the url of your website, blog or feed, choose a location (Hong Kong, Beijing or Shanghai), enter the validation code and wait for a response from the script.
An alternative to RSS feeds is to get those feeds by mail or using a service on the web that displays them. Newsgator is supposed to work fine at the moment. It would be nice to receive information about Netvibes and Google Reader.
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Test if you website is blocked in China
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Google Reader works fine in China.