PandaPassport.com – China Blog

For anyone living in China, Skype can be a pretty sweet deal.

I use skype-out to call home, and it’s pretty cheap. I used to use IP cards for long distance cards, but this is far better. Ideally, if you can convince your family to use a skype account on the other end – then of course your calls are free.

You can support my site by signing up through the following links, if you’re interested:

• Buy Skype-Out Credit
• Get Skype-to-Skype on your Mobile
• Buy Skype Hardware

I received the following promo in my inbox from them just now, and I thought I’d post it as it may be of some interest to some people:

Aug 29 2009 Update: Unfortunately this workaround doesn’t fly anymore. But check out John Pasden’s post on Sinosplice for an even better one.

I don’t use Twitter too much. I run my blog feeds through it, and that’s about it. But I do see the use in being able to publish to the web via text message. It could come in handy in certain situations.

Sending SMS messages to Twitter from China is relatively expensive, at least by Chinese standards:

“you need to text up Britain — the only internationally-open number is prefixed +44, somewhere in the British isles. International SMS is 10 times the cost of standard SMS; the moment a text message leaves the mainland, you pay CNY 1, not CNY 0.10.” –David Feng

So while I don’t plan to use it that much, I just set up an unusual workaround so that I can send text messages from my cell phone in China, and they’ll be published on Twitter.

Here’s how it works.

1. Set up an account on Fanfou.com, which is a Chinese version of Twitter. Jiwai.de will likely work as well.
2. Take the RSS feed of your Fanfou page, and run it through Twitterfeed. Update: Your fanfou RSS feed should look something like this, http://api.fanfou.com/statuses/user_timeline/pandapassport.rss, where you’d replace “pandapassport” with your own username. Look for the orange RSS logo in the bottom right, and copy and paste the link.
   

Now when you send a text message to Fanfou, it will show on that page, but it will also be fed to your Twitter page as well. Unfortunately, your Fanfou username will be stuck on the front (so choosing a short name is best), and a tinyurl link to your Fanfou “tweet” will be appended to the end. The fastest that Twitterfeed will check for updates is every 30 mins, so it will require that time at the most before your tweet hits Twitter.

But in case you ever need to send a message like “Help! I’ve been arrested in an Olympic protest” (or something along those lines…) this will do the trick, I’m sure. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently featured on Gizmodo, here’s an interesting keyboard which will recognized hand-written Chinese characters.

Of course, most people would never bother with such as thing when Chinese input editors are so easy to use these days.

But who knows? Maybe it might be of interest to some of you readers out there who are studying chinese as a second language.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was just reading Ryan’s post over at DaobyDesign about how he guides his readers to upgrade to at least internet explorer 6:

My parameters were simple. If the person visiting the site had any browser other than Internet Explorer – they could come in. And to show I’m not a complete brute, I decided that those visiting with IE7, and IE6 could also come and play. Otherwise you get redirected to a page that informs the visitor that they might want to reconsider their choice of Web surfing app.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of any version of internet explorer, so I went a step further. Now if anyone lands on any of my single post pages, they see this alert just above the post headline:

Internet Explorer is BAD! Get Firefox with Google Toolbar, because unlike IE, Firefox loads the top of a webpage first so you can experience faster web-browsing.

The link is usually a firefox referral text link, though because this one was within the post, it might not always show, so I just linked to mozilla. Yes, I’m encouraging users to download, and I’ll get a small referral commission if they download it. But as this is a product I personally use and believe in, it’s one have have no hesitations recommending to readers. Readers who are using firefox already will not see this alert. Only IE users.

Here’s the code for how I made it, in case you’d like to use it one your site as well:

['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') !== false)) return true; else return false; } ?> { ?> Internet Explorer is BAD! [INSERT FIREFOX TEXT LINK REFERRAL SCRIPT HERE] because unlike IE, Firefox loads the top of a webpage first so you can experience faster web-browsing.

For webmasters here in China, you might also recommend the Firefox Flickr addon, to help your readers get around the Flick block.

Considering the trouble feedburner is supposedly giving to China Telecom users, I thought I’d take the feedburner graphics off my site in an effort to make sure the page loads well for everyone who reads it.

Don’t listen to the recent reports which say all feeds are blocked in China. It’s all hearsay, and none of them seem to have noticed what people inside of China are saying (i.e. the links above Re: China Telecom).

In any case, I decided to give feedsky a go. Because if big tech websites like arstechnica and techcrunch can’t figure out what’s going on with RSS feeds in China, how can you expect the average reader to know what to do?

I decided to make it simple for readers who want to subscribe:

Inside China? Use Feedsky (?)
Not in China? Use Feedburner

If you want to do the same, here’s the code for what I just did.
Inside China? Use <a href="http://feed.feedsky.com/YOUR_FEED">Feedsky</a> (<a href="http://www.pandapassport.com/web-20/how-to-set-up-feedsky-china/">?</a>)<br /> Not in China? Use <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR-FEED">Feedburner</a>

For those of you who don’t know Feedsky, it’s a Chinese knockoff of Feedburner. I’ve been using it for about half a year now on my much neglected Chinese site, and it looks fine. For those of you who might require a little help navigating your way through setting up your feed in a second language (i.e. Chinese), here are a few step by step instructions:

UPDATE:

1. A big Thank you to Yee in who reports in the comments that Feedsky actually does have an English Interface for their site.
2. A big cao ni ma go out the guys at feedsky for making that English version of their site inaccessible from the site main page. And practically impossible to search via google. How can you not link to that shit with an English Version button in some corner?!!?!!

Fuck. Like, really…
I owe somebody a kick in the nads. I’m sending them an email right now!
Read the rest of this entry »

Who remembers altavista?

Not a real useful search engine these days. Though I do like their baidu-like mp3 search and babelfish translating tool.

But it seems software giant Microsoft is jumping headfirst into the translating pool, leaving Altavista’s tiny little Babelfish with hardly a drop of water to swim in, save for possibly the crack between Bill Gates’ butt-cheeks.

Windows Live Translator Beta

h/t to Sina tech Blog