Thursday, June 2, 2011

Metapost: How Much Do You Not Want To Update Your Bookmarks?

I may have mentioned once or twice in the past that I work for a large software corporation. Recently, the company has tightened up the firewalls such that anything with a 'custom' URL is essentially blocked from view when using the company computers.

The practical upshot of this is when I switched URLs from "www.anamardoll.blogspot.com" to "www.anamardoll.com", my company firewall started preventing me from viewing the site at work. The situation I am now in is that I can access the site dashboard to write / read / edit my posts, and our comment engine Disqus sends me comment notifications to my phone (which always brighten my day, I might add!), but I can't actually post comments myself or reply to existing ones until I get home and off the company network.

I've been holding off changing the URL because:
  1. I can still view the site on my phone, and I can comment in the evenings when I get home. 
  2. Updating your bookmarks and reader subscriptions are a pain for you guys. 
  3. Any existing URL linkbacks out there will probably be broken if I make the change. Ugh.
  4. Good grief, I have a custom URL -- I don't want to just dump it.
I've thought about making a second board that uses my custom URL and just redirects to this blogspot board, but that wouldn't really fix #1 (unless you didn't mind being redirected each time) and I'm fairly certain that #2 would still be a major issue. That makes Panda sad, as you can see above.

I've put in an "unblock" request with my company, but I'm not terribly optimistic about the results. I'm wondering if this sort of issue is affecting anyone else -- I know that I have at least three readers at my company (for the record, this is Work Friend #1, Work Friend #2, and Husband) that currently can't access my site for the same reason. I have no way of knowing whether or not the bulk of my 72 Google Reader Subscribers can actually view and comment this site from their day-to-day locations, so I figured I'd ask.

Open thread: please note whether or not you have the ability to view-and-comment on the site on a daily basis, and how much you would hate me if I changed URLs on you over something trivial like me not being able to respond to comments except during the period of 7:13 pm to 9:37 pm every night.

Also: If any of you know some kind of cool web trick that lets me set the blog address back to blogspot BUT fixes #2 by redirecting people automatically to the "corrected" URL (i.e., such that someone looking for "www.anamardoll.com/stupid-metapost" would be automatically shuffled off to "www.anamardoll.blogspot.com/stupid-metapost" please will you take pity on me and let me know how to set this up? Because that would be awesome.
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10 comments:

  1. Redwood Rhiadra6/02/2011 11:51 AM

    I'm one of your Google reader subscribers. I don't have any trouble reading/commenting from either work or home, but my work site is cool - they don't block *anything*.  (Probably because we're a small company and our single IT person doesn't want to deal with maintaining that sort of thing).

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  2. Matt Smyczynski6/02/2011 12:32 PM

    Where I work, stuff is only blocked if it's malicious, so I have no trouble.

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  3. Charleen Merced6/02/2011 12:35 PM

    I use both google reader and this websites. No issues here. 

    By the way, it doesn't let you reply directly in disqus?

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  4. BrinBellway6/02/2011 12:41 PM

    I have no way of knowing whether or not the bulk of my 72 Google Reader
    Subscribers can actually view and comment this site from their
    day-to-day locations, so I figured I'd ask.

    1: My non-existent workplace* can't block anything.
    2: Thank you for recommending Google Reader. I love it.

    I won't mind if you end up changing it.

    *This is not as bad as it sounds. I live in a decently-well-off Ameri-Canadian family, and in such situations seventeen-year-olds are not expected to be able to support themselves.

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  5. Ana Mardoll6/02/2011 1:03 PM

    This is a test reply from Disqus. Let's see if it works! (Experimenting is such fun.)

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  6. BrinBellway6/02/2011 1:13 PM

    Looks good to me.

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  7. Ana Mardoll6/02/2011 1:16 PM

    OK, I posted this comment from Blogger on my work computer AND I can see it on the site from my phone (plus, Brin just said SHE can see it, w00t!), SO it seems like I do have a work-around for posting comments. YAY!

    The downside to this is that I can only "Reply" to existing comments, so if I "Reply" to your post but my reply actually addresses several people / issues / thoughts, well that's why. Not a bad workaround, overall, so we will leave things the way they are. (Mostly because changing everything looked devilishly complicated. Here's hoping Blogger never goes out of business or otherwise forces me to move!)

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  8. Charleen Merced6/02/2011 6:26 PM

    \o/

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  9. leianajade6/03/2011 10:06 AM

    Silly internet at work policies. The last 'real' company I worked for didn't want us to do any personal surfing of the internet at all, and it was heavily policed. It wouldn't have been a problem, if I'd had enough work to do, but the truth was, they hired me full-time for a part-time load of work. >.<

    That said, I mainly access the internet at home, periodically at a bookstore, so access is not a problem for me.

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  10. Kristy Griffin6/04/2011 11:44 AM

    hmm, would the blogspot one let me comment as well, I wonder?  (I can see your website just fine from work, but my company insists on using an out-of-date browser that it won't let up upgrade, and I can't comment until I get home - by which point I've usually forgotten what I wanted to say!)

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