Eric's Beijing Diary

Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China right now. It's because of the riots in Urumqi. At least, that's what provoked it. But that is certainly not the only reason they are staying blocked. CCTV ran a feature on Kaixin, the Chinese version of Facebook. It's quite clear that they want to keep Facebook locked out long enough to give the home brand a chance. My blog is blocked, too, but I have manged to get in with a proxy. Blogspot has been blocked before. In fact, it was blocked for the first three years I was in China. But in the past, they always left the update site open. Now they have both of them blocked. I have found a proxy for each one, but they are clunky. I think I can get caught up when I get to the States, because I always write my blog first in Notepad. Sometimes in a real notepad (remember those?), but always in Notepad on my computer. Open Notepad, press f5, and start writing. I do that for a couple reasons. One is that when I first began to use Blogspot, Blogger (the update site) was unpredictable. Growing faster than they could keep up with it, I guess. And there was a time difference once I moved to Beijing, which meant that I could not publish posts directly. But I also do it because it gives me a very portable and complete backup for everything I have written. I can search my own notes using the Windows search utility much faster than I can do an online search. Facebook, though is going to be a problem. I can see it with a proxy, but I cannot publish. I am not much of a social networking kind of person, but I was hoping to use Facebook as a host for jpegs and videos.