It is painful to write anymore about Government of Pakistan’s decision to block Bogspot hosted blogs in Pakistan. There are things that you learn while growing up in countries like Pakistan. Accepting censorship, crazyness, fundamentalism and corruption as the realities of life is part of the deal.There are still many Pakistani blogs hosted on Blogspot. I would really love to read them and share these blogs here but the problem is that I can not access these blogs with proxies like pkblogs and inblogs. I can not understand why these bloggers are not moving their blogs to other hosting services such as wordpress? Specially the Pakistani bloggers, they should really consider moving their blogs to other services since not moving is seriously affecting their readership in Pakistan and this is exactly what Government wanted to achieve. By not moving your blogs you are helping them achieve censorship so easily.
These are some of the blogs that I tried to read today but was unable to access them:
why blogspot?
Hi there, nice blog. Hope you don’t mind that I link you from my blog?
Yeah – its not easy to access to access my blog from pkblogs. Though it doesn’t work sometimes, it is the best thing out there and I appreciate your complaint. I am very aware of it and I understand your frustration
I have not moved my blog for a couple of reason.
1) the pain in the ass reason – wordpress does not import the new blogger beta code easily as of yet. this may change soon. I have tried to import, but it gave me 100′s of errors.
2) i have done nothing wrong. the government is to blame for banning the blogs. blogspot has done nothing wrong either. by just switching my blog, i feel i am bowing down to their idiotic ban on blogspot. I do want Pakistani readers and its a bit irritating that most of the visitors on my cricket blog focusing on Pakistan come from the UK, US and India, and not from my homeland.
“By not moving your blogs you are helping them achieve censorship so easily.” I disagree – In order to fight the man, i have stand my ground.
But please be patient. The pkblogs site is useful and it does go down a lot. I hope they know how to fix it. If not here is the other solution.
On the bright side, I will be starting to cross-post at http://cricket.bloggers.pk/ which we are in the process of setting up and which is a wordpress site. This will enable me to keep my blogspot blog as well as gain Pakistani readership which I have sought for a while now.
I found your blog randomly as some of your readers came to my site through your blog. I wish you could told me your thought directly somehow, but I suppose there is no way you can access my blog and get my contact information.
Sincerely,
Omar
cubano, they banned blogspot for some really stupid reason.
Omar, Thank you for the link. You can keep your blogspot blog but please provide your readers some alternate way to access the content at some other location.
“1) the pain in the ass reason – wordpress does not import the new blogger beta code easily as of yet. this may change soon. I have tried to import, but it gave me 100’s of errors. ”
I recently moved my blog from blogger to wordpress. It didn’t work with the automatic ‘Blogger and Blogspot’ import feature. I ended up creating an RSS feed and saving all the posts as an RSS file and then importing the posts to wordpress using the RSS import feature. I worked without any problems.
Tamashbeen, have you tried Tor – http://tor.eff.org/ – I wouldn’t trust it for everything but it may work for bypassing their firewalls.
I had no trouble importing my blogspot blogs to wordpress. So I guess this issue is related to the blogger beta code.
Cubano, thanks I will give it a try.
Hey, Did Tor work for you?