Blogger still playing up!

Blogger is still playing up here in China - I had expected everything to be smooth here before the Games, but apparently not. Wordpress is completely out and the netnanny rears her ugly face at regular, though seemingly arbitrary intervals.

Anyway, I've just given my last talk here at the KITPC, a two hour talk to the students which was fun, as always. Tomorrow I have one more at IHEP and then I'm done for talks in China. Pretty tired after a two hour enjoyable ad-lib today. While the students do ask very good questions here, I feel relaxed talking to them, which definitely gives me good practice.

Anyway, my clue today for my magical mystery tour next week is that my first stop is going to be a small city in Shaanxi called Baoli. It'll take around 15 hours to get there by train.

And a photo from this weekend, reminding me that China is so constantly photogenic. Taken at Houhai lake while tucking into some spicy duck neck and chicken feet - beautiful!

Feeds and fields

I spoke about Yahoo Pipes a long time ago, but here's a fun one from Googlesystem blog. This pipes the comments feed and sees who has been commenting most on your blogger blog.

A quick pic from Sunday when I drove with a couple of friends up to Pico Sacro, about 10 km from Santiago de Compostela and a great peak for looking over a whole swathe of Galicia.

Google having hiccups in China

Things are very busy at the moment, still with a paper on its final stages along with various other responsibilities I'm involved with.

However, today there seems to be major problems with Google, here in Beijing at least. I can't open google.com, blogger.com or Google Reader. This is the biggest block I've seen for a long while and with wikipedia being blocked again last week it seems that somethings up. I'm currently writing this in blogger using the phproxy add on, which is a savior for fast, easy viewing when you don't want the trouble of using Tor.

Anyway, if anyone else knows more details about this then please let pass on any information!

Including your Feed Reader blogs in a blog roll

From the Google Systems blog are a set of instructions for taking the subscribed blogs in your Google Reader and automatically creating a blog roll which can be pasted into your blog. This takes about 2 minutes to set up and means a closer tie between the blogs you read and the blogs you advertise to others. Note that you can choose which blogs in your feed reader are included in the blog roll.

The new blog roll with a few new blogs can be found in the left column of this blog.

Expandable post hack for Blogger

This is a quick test for a new Blogger hack I've been looking for for a while. Currently things are back up to full speed and I don't have much time to write an extensive post. If this hack is working then...

...you should be able to read all of this sentence.

The hack comes from this site, and includes a javascript add-in to the template file for the blog. If anyone has any ideas as to the security of this I would be interested to know.