O.k, before you get smart with me and say something stupid like “Hey, Chris – just don’t use the web” or “Hey, Chris – why don’t you leave China – then you won’t have this problem…”, I have this to say to you: “Um, lameass, why don’t you just shoot yourself.”
I wrote a post about 3 weeks ago about the blocking of (access adjustments made to) Feedburner URLs in China. Rick from Feedburner was nice enough to submit a comment to my post. Rick basically said they know of the problem and are trying to work with the ISPs in China to find a workaround. (ok, those were my words from what I remember he wrote, I actually haven’t read his comment for ~3 weeks).
Well, so far, it’s still blocked. Best of luck to Feedburner/Google in hope these guys will start thinking rationally… Ain’t gonna work.
So, I ask this question: Why don’t website owners just host their own feeds? Many of these blogs, such as wordpress or moveable type, have the mechanics built-in already!
Could it be these Website owners want to get an accurate number of subscribers? Sorry, last I checked, feed subscriptions are passive. So the number of subscribers Feedburner provides (such as “you have 3823 subscribers”) is bogus. Please. Correct me if I’m wrong.
I don’t see any other reason to use Feedburner, exclusively. (Again, please, someone shed some light on this). Perhaps you want to monetize your feeds by placing ads? There are other ways to do this! (i.e. adding adsence code in your feeds).
If people insist on using Feedburner, or similar, why can’t you also provide a link to your original feed URL as well. Richard wised up and did this! (Thank’s Richard!) Bjorn also wrote about this.
What really erks me is China-focused blogs using Feedburner, only. Do these guys have any clue what’s going on in China??!
- Chinalyst – A nice feed aggregator for China-specific English blogs. Their main feed is using Feedburner. Are these guys even in China?
- Shanghaiist – You are a blog “about Shanghai”
- There’s many more, but I don’t think I need to waste my time listing all of them. Go to Chinalyst and look for yourself.
Let’s all wake up and not alienate your readers in China! (Those of us who are interested in China, who live in China, and who read your China-focused blogs)
And no, using Tor is not always an option, thank you.
Update Oct, 20: Joel from Danwei left a rather sarcastic comment for this post which kind of put the jokes on me… I apologize for somehow overlooking the fairly clear “china safe” feed links. But my original question stands: why not host your own feed?
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