I ran into my good friend Nat at the sex show this weekend. After the requisite, "What did you buy?" questions - She: nothing yet. Me: beige 400-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets - ...
(Yes, I know. I went to a sex show and bought not just cotton sheets, but beige cotton sheets. But in my defense, it's because my goodie drawer runneth over with every interesting sex toy worth owning. That, and I also bought some very cute pasties. But more on that later.)
...she informed me that my blog had been censored at our friend's workplace. He had tried to read my blog on one of his breaks and instead of being entertained with stories of cucumber dildos, sex toys and ninja fucking (come on, how can you not buy one of those shirts?), he got a message stating that my site had been blocked for "pornographic content."
Upon learning this, I jumped up and down and cheered, "Yay! I've been censored by workplaces!" Because, really, when the search terms that bring people to your blog include "italian lesbian porn" and "my boobs hurt from all that fucking", you kind of expect these things to happen. And it's far more fun to celebrate them than it is to lament them.
Today, I was bragging D-man about my new-found censorship celebrity and he gave me some seemingly foolproof advice to help my readers get around this little problem. While there are a number of services that allow people to surf banned websites without being tracked, many workplaces are aware of these and ban them as well (as is the case in our friend's workplace.) But, there's a way around that, too, thanks to smartypants D.
Go to Google Translate and type the blog URL under "Translate a Web Page." Then, instead of translating it into another language, pick a language you wish my blog was in and "translate" it from that into English - Korean to English, Portuguese to English, Italian to English - it doesn't matter. My blog is all multi-cultural that way. Upon "translating" to English, the blog will pop up on the Google page and will register as a Google hit instead of a hit on my blog, thus avoiding the censorship entirely.
Because the only thing cooler than being censored by my friend's workplace is teaching people how to stick it to the censors.
You're welcome.
Now, surf safe, and don't forget to wear protection. You never know what kind of viruses you could pick up on some of these naughty blogs.
3 comments:
Back when I still had a job, I tried this and our particular websense filter also blocked translation sites, even Google's.
So if translating it fails, there's always the possibility of using a reader, though that will make you want to slap people who publish 200-word feeds, because their posts will show as read in the reader but then you didn't get to read the post because the site was blocked. Just a heads-up for anyone working for a fascist company.
Wow, I totally just stopped missing my old job for a minute there.
Wahoo baby! i knew you had it in you. I hope you're bringing the pasties up for our slumber party!! WOO!
I'm glad you saw the humour in being blocked as pornography. I thought it was hilarious. And how appropriate to hear the news at a sex show!
(By the way, I ended up buying sheets, too. But at least mine are burnt orange!)
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