Switching Blog Platforms

Today's weather: High = 5 Low = 0
Sunny

Taking a tip from my Wuhan colleagues, I'm going to be switching to the travelblog.org host platform. Basically, that allows me to post more pictures and videos to make the blog more snazzy looking, attract more readership, and have the combined effect of text and photos to tell more of a story. Plus it's easier to access.

While blogspot can also do pictures and video, the ongoing problem has been net censorship and limitations on what I can do with this host platform by always using a proxy server to access it. Consistent blocking of many key websites has been going on for at least two years now in China, and shows no signs of letting up. The common blocked sites are facebook, twitter, youtube, and of course the blogger (blogspot) platform.

The most popular way around this is accessing a VPN (virtual private network) but that requires money, and there is still no guarantee that the VPN will actually be reliable. It also happens to be a very slow and painstaking way to access facebook and youtube, based on friends who go for the VPN. I'd rather just do without, and then wait for the winter and summer holidays when I'm outside of China to do semi-annual facebook maintenance.

Meanwhile, the travelblog forum is quite user friendly. It's also the most popular forum for foreign travelers (hence the name) and unlikely to be blocked. Expats in various Chinese cities have caught on to blogging with a travel blog, and I may as well join the bandwagon.

For starters, you can highlight this link and click here:

http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/China/Shanghai/Xujiahui/blog-555712.html

Once that blog is up and running, this one will be more or less saved and archived onto my hard drive. Then I'll be putting this blog into the dustbin, figuratively speaking, and going with travelblog as the main platform.