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UPDATE: Part 1 of 2 posts on China Proxy Server Tips.  Part 2 by Kai Pan is here. 

I received an email from one of CN Reviews‘ readers yesterday. Here is the abstract of Sue’s kind message:

I just stumbled onto your blog and find it enormously helpful. I wonder if you already have a post on proxy servers and if not, may consider doing one.

I’m incredibly frustrated about not being able to find certain sites. I’ve just arrived in China and am still figuring out how to find the right proxy server, esp if I’m trying to blog.

I am not a technical person and really don’t know much about proxy servers, but I do find my way to read 99.5% of the blogs I like including those are not directly accessible in Shanghai, such as gigaom.com.

Option I: Gladder - Great Ladder

This is a firefox add-on called “Great Ladder”- ladder to the great wall. You can find it here.

• Step 1. Click on the green button says “Add to Firefox”.
• Step 2: You will see the pop up window asks you to install it. Follow the instruction and you will get an icon on the right bottom corner of your browser like this:

Now you are armed with the ladder to climb over the wall!

When you are on a web page, right click on the ladder icon and you will see the menu like above image. We are lucky that we don’t need it for CN Reviews. We are not afraid of being harmonized but would prefer not to be!

To enable the gladder, simply click on the URL on the menu. When the gladder is enabled, you will see a “check” mark in front of the URL See above image. Joe Duck’s blog is not as lucky as CN Review and it looks like his when the gladder is not enabled.

A recent Gladder review by Jianjun can be found here.

Option II: RSS feed readers such as Google Reader.

I don’t have a problem reading Joe Duck’s blog after I subscribed to it on Google Reader. But, of course, I can’t see the blog visual design, can’t browse by its categories, tags or menus. I think RSS feed reader is a good option for the blogs that you are familiar with and want to subscribe to it.

That’s all my secrets. I think they are good enough for people don’t like the technical hassle. Good news is that you don’t need it for English Wikpedia since a few days’ ago. Good luck!