We get excited when this happens

Blogspot.com is unblocked for some reason. SO IS WIKIPEDIA!! Woohoo!! I can view my blog and search for random shit again. This is a strange feeling. Obviously not one that many Americans know, for good reason :-)

Another blockage that may get less coverage than these two site is feedburner.com. Many web sites I read use feedburner to syndicate their RSS feeds. The reason is that feedburner can track things like subscriptions and other demographic information that is useful to advertisers. But the site prepends the word "feeds" to all URLs. And apparently that's a no-no in China.

What's strange is that I can still get the RSS feed from feedburner -- it's just that I can't click directly into the link from the RSS item. This becomes a problem when sites post only tidbits of articles in their RSS feeds. For example if I see a story on THT or Wired that I want to read more of, I have to open a new tab and enter the URL myself. Yeah, it doesn't sound like much, but when compared with clicking a link, it's a lot of work.

Fortunately some sites, like Ars and /., provide "Read More" links in their RSS feeds that link directly to the news item. So even though their feeds use feedburner, I can click through to the actual story.

I might actually email THT about this issue. It's not like it's difficult to add a "Read More" link. And it functions as a call to action (Uncle Bob, you should be proud of me that I know that term) also.

In the meantime, baseball season has started, with my beloved Orioles already down 0-1. Most every site I see is picking them to be last in the division this year -- and I can't disagree. The fun thing is that because of the time difference, when I get to work in the morning there are games still going on, because it's only 9 PM ET. Games on the west coast don't even start until 10 PM ET, so on the weekends I should be able to wake up at 9:30 some days and go watch some baseball at Big Bamboo (where I saw the Super Bowl).

Exciting. My favorite-est blog ever is already posting like 5 times a day :-)