Access Blogger and Wordpress Blogs in China

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Many of the largest free blogging services are blocked in China by the GFW. As we here at Lost Laowai believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom of expression - below find instructions on how to set your computer up to access blogs that are hosted at two of the largest free blog hosts - Blogger/Blogspot and Wordpress.com.

A common way to access such blogs is to go through a Web-based proxy service, or use a collection of proxy/anonymizer programs such as Tor. Though these are well and good, the following method will allow you a much quicker access time - as rather than bouncing around the globe through a proxy service, this simply slips a non-blocked IP in place of the blocked one. That's cool, trust us.

How to unblock Blogger and Wordpress.com blogs: The Steps
Open up a text editor (notepad, or whatever you've got lying around your system)
In the text editor, copy and paste the following:
function FindProxyForURL(url,host){
if(dnsDomainIs(host, ".blogspot.com")){
return "PROXY 72.14.219.190:80";
}
if(dnsDomainIs(host, ".wordpress.com")){
return "PROXY 72.232.101.41:80";
}
return "DIRECT";
}Save the text file as proxy.pac in your computer's ROOT directory (on a PC that's usually your C:\ drive). NOTE: Be careful that the text editor doesn't save the file as proxy.pac.txt - it should be called proxy.pac.

Instructions for different browsers vary. We can't include instructions for all, but here's how to do it for Firefox and Internet Explorer - if you use an alternative to these, you should be able to adapt this method to your browser without too much trouble.

Firefox
Click Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings... (screenshot)
Select the last option - "Automatic proxy configuration URL:" - and enter file:///C:/proxy.pac in the field just below it.
Save the settings and close Firefox. Upon relaunching Firefox you should now be able to access http://xxxx.wordpress.com and http://xxxx.blogspot.com blogs.
Internet Explorer
Click Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN settings (screenshot)
Check the "Use automatic configuration script" box and enter file://c:/proxy.pac in the Address field. (note: the address to the file is slightly different than the Firefox one - there is one less forward slash.)
Save your settings, restart Internet Explorer and you should be able to access http://xxxx.wordpress.com and http://xxxx.blogspot.com blogs.
Mac Instructions
This hack also works on computers running the Mac OS. Simply follow the above PC instructions, changing the path to the proxy.pac file. For instance, if you have the pac file saved to your desktop the path would be file:///Users/yourname/Desktop/proxy.pac, changing "yourname" to whatever your username is.