From time to time Political Blogs are found to be inaccessible from within certain organisations. Here are a few ideas about how to get your blog to be accessible again.

The best option - of course - is to get the ban lifted.

Beyond that, there are some things that bloggers and blog-readers can do to access the blocked websites.

So, how do you get a ban lifted?

My suspicion is that most blog-bans are caused by cockup rather than conspiracy - even though it is flattering to think that someone cares enough to ban our blog. I think bans are usually down to:

• Your blog appearing on a list of sites banned automatically by the corporate firewall - it could be simple as the odd “f*ck” in an article.
• You are falling foul of a restrictive corporate policy - perhaps from some years ago.
• The IT department is having a laugh.
• And (very) occasionally some insecure politician or manager with a lack of self-confidence has actually had it banned.

If you are on an auto-ban list that came with the corporate software, then talk to the people who own the list if you can find out who they are. They will usually be helpful - but go through to Technical Support and avoid Sales like the plague. In this case, it will take some time.

If it is a real ban, then it helps to have friends inside - and an innocent enquiry along the lines of “this didn’t work” along with an explanation of a valid reason why the site needed to be accessed may help. Something like this:

“I followed a link from <insert name of public figure here>’s website to <insert address of your blog here> website and it wouldn’t let me read it. Can you help?” from an insider should have a good chance of doing the trick.

Of course, make sure a link does exist, and be prepared to show them.

Probably the enquiry should be addressed to someone in IT who is sympathetic to the enquirer, and will just make the change on the spot. If you can do the request in passing at the water cooler or when something else is being fixed, so much the better.

Some ideas for the Blogger

You need to make your blog more accessible, or provide ways for the reader to read your blog by roundabout means. Here are some possible ways:

• Start serving full RSS feeds rather than just the excerpt (i.e., summary feeds). That means that people can read your articles completely in their RSS reader. It means that you will probably have fewer web visits - but if you are blocked you weren’t getting them anyway. This should be an option in your blogging software.
• Offer an email subscription option - Feedburner can do this from your RSS feed.
• Set up a mirror site at a different URL. I’m not sure how to do this easily from Blogger, but it is easy from Wordpress. I covered this recently in “Pole Vaulting the Great Firewall of China“. A less elegant way to create a mirror site is to use a desktop blog editor such as Blogdesk, which can cross-post to more than one site at once.
• Create a mobile version of your site, using (for example) the Mowser service.
• Allow Google to cache your articles - so that readers can find the full article there if your site is blocked.

What can the blog-reader do?

Here are a few thoughts.

• The best way: get the blog unblocked by your organisation.
• Suggest that the blogger use one of the methods above to make their writing more accessible.
• Use a proxy - which is a remote computer that accesses the website you are interested in and then feeds it back to you. The proxy itself is not banned, so you can see the page. These are all over the internet, and change constantly.
• Probably the most effective proxy to use is the Google Web Accelerator - which also has the effect of anonymising your web browsing activity in the website log files as the page requests come from Google. For this you will need to install software on your machine, so you may need to justify the requirement to your manager / IT Department (read up on the benefits).

However, bear corporate policy in mind - management will have to follow it. Back in 1997 I had a colleague who was sacked because management had set up what they thought was a strong policy - which turned out to be a self-inflicted elephant trap when management ended up forcing themselves to sack one of their key employees for a relatively minor offence in the middle of a rush job.

Wrapping-Up

In my experience public sector bodies have relatively liberal internet access policies in “own time”, so in my view most bloggers who are quietly satisfied at being “banned” are probably being a touch self-indulgent.

However, I have not worked in bodies at the heart of national government - whether in Westminster, Cardiff, Edinburgh or elsewhere. Perhaps managers in those bodies are more paranoid.

Tags: blog blocked, firewall, government, proxy server, google cache, subscribe by email