Blocked – Unblocked – Blocked?

Alex March 6th, 2009

Well, seems I might have been a bit premature last week in stating that Blogger had been unblocked. Seems as if it’s been blocked again – maybe just a technical hitch had made it available for a short time?

However, seems some other sites have now been opened up. According to Nazret.com:

Mohamed Keita of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) writes, Ethiopia has lifted ban of websites that the government find them to be critical. CPJ’s own website has been blocked in Ethiopia since August of last year and it is now once again accessible in Ethiopia, Mr Keita writes.

The Annual Human Rights Report by the US State Department has expressed concerns about Internet freedom in Ethiopia. The report said, “The government restricted access to the Internet and blocked opposition Web sites, including the sites of the OLF, ONLF, Ginbot 7, and several news blogs and sites run by opposition diaspora groups, such as the Ethiopian Review, CyberEthiopia.com, Quatero Amharic Magazine, Tensae Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian Media Forum”.

Reports from Addis Ababa have also confirmed that nazret.com is now accessible in Ethiopia. nazret has been blocked in Ethiopia since 2005 and we have seen a spike in traffic from Ethiopia since the beginning of 2009.

For info: OLF = Oromo Liberation Front and ONLF = Ogaden National Liberation Front

Simple as Pie

Alex August 8th, 2008

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that I’ve added a ‘VSO feeds’ section to the side bar. I wanted to be able to aggregate feeds from other VSO volunteers to show on my site, unfortunately the RSS widget built into Wordpress won’t aggregate feeds for you – you’d need to create a new wdiget for each feed – not really what I wanted.

However, I did find the SimplePie Plugin for Wordpress which has done exactly what I needed and was very straightforward to get up and running. The display is all done via templates and is very configurable. The only (very small) niggle that I have is that you need to specify the feed urls in the code, rather than in the Wordpress admin pages, e.g.

<?php
echo @SimplePieWP(array(
     'http://markvso.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default',
     'http://siddypen.wordpress.com/feed',

http://nonoincambodia.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default'

      ), array(
     'items' => 10,
     'date_format' => 'j M Y',
     'truncate_item_description' => 100
  ));
?>

At the moment I’m only showing feeds from 3 blogs, but if you have a feed that you’d like me to add then please send it on.

Rather unfortunately the blogging system that VSO uses (http://www.vso-stories.net/) doesn’t provide RSS feeds of the postings (!) – though it does provide an email subscription service. So there are several other blogs I’d like to include in my aggregator which would be very relevant, e.g. Julian Bass’s blog, but I can’t until vso-stories provides an RSS feed factility :-(