Writing in China

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Chinaren. 13th Oct 2009.

In my search for various funny photos for Lethargic Friday, I stumbled over www.thoughts.com website. It’s not really just a photo site, but a social networking kind of deal as well.

In their photos area is a wide range of images, ranging from the really quite nice, to the strange, (such as the one below), to the downright bizarre. They’re submitted by various users, which may explain the variety.

There are other things on the site though, from blogs to videos, polls, surveys a news area (rather out of date), a forum and groups area.

I’ve signed up because it looks like it may be a bit of fun, but also because I think it might be quite a good place to add my links and generally advertise my blog etc. Not that I believe in splashing my blog name all over the place, but if you put your links in a forum signature, and then actively and suitably join that community, people will click on them.

These can also be picked up by search engines, which is good for your pagerank and so on and so forth.

I have to say some of the blogs on the site are rather… meh, but there are a few good ones. The videos mostly consist of the usual ‘YouTube’ kind of tosh, though there was one that made me laugh.

I think the key areas here are the forums and groups though. For a bit of promotion, and a bit of fun. It’s not as big as the larger social networking sites, so you stand more chance of being noticed if you contribute well. I’m a member of numerous forums, and they’ve provided a decent amount of traffic over time.

I'm considering switching this blog over to Wordpress, which I use for my Blog of Lies and Revublog. This one uses the B2Evolution platform.

It's not that this one doesn't do the job, but it doesn't have the scope and add-ons that WP does, and sometimes throws up strange and annoying errrors.

The down-side is that I'll probably have to run a converter or something, and I will lose this pages' Google pagerank, which only went up to three a little while ago. Not that that is so very important, I just hate losing!

Has anyone swapped to WP from another blog? Was it easy? I've set up from scratch of course, but never swapped over an established one.

Yesterday I mentioned that a load of blogs seem to have been newly blocked by China. So I made a list of them and checked them again today from work, which is usually a little bit more reliable than my home connection.

Sure enough about 65% of them I can no longer access. Most of these seem to have been blocked in the last few days.

Here's a list of blogs probably newly blocked by China: (From my droplist in no particular order). If your blog is on this list, then I may no longer be able drop EC on you, so please accept my apologies.

http://www.airfare-now.com/
http://blog.ourdoglog.com/
http://www.dharkanjhel.com/
http://www.review-spew.com/
http://www.my-sense-and-sensibility.com/
http://www.triciamgalvez.com/
http://www.kikamzpera.com/
http://www.nysilly.com/
http://www.thejoysofsimplelife.com/
http://www.justanotherpixel.net/
http://namesherry.com/
http://www.daisybookworm.com/
http://lisgold.com/
http://www.outofthemundane.com/
http://www.allthebs.com/
http://www.lunarhemizphere.com/
http://www.mariucasperfume.com/
http://www.pinchthatpenny.org/
http://www.staciesmadness.com/
http://www.newzaroundus.com/

I decided to give my Double Whammy droplist a good going through yesterday and update it.

It links to other blogs that have the Entrecard and Adgitise widgets on, to help make dropping/clicking easier. As I'm in China my droplist is tailored to reach sites that aren't blocked by the 'Great' Firewall of China, and let me tell you something...

Access is being strangled!

Now, it may be just a glitch, but there were nearly 30 blogs (about 10%) that I could reach before, and now I can't. China is slowly cutting the web off. This has happened since I started my droplist, about three months ago.

Anyway, I've updated it, and of course anyone outside of China should be able to reach them all no problem.

If you would like to use it, simply click here, or use the link under my Entrecard widget.

You can now also add the logo to your site if you wish:

Droplist logo code: