Non-US Readers: Your New Country-Specific URL for Strobist

Canadian reader Eros Peterson tweets:

I type in http://www.strobist.com from work, and I get forwarded to http://strobist.blogspot.ca(?) Office firewall blocks says it's an XXX site!

Alas, we are still PG-rated here. But you are running into Google's new country-specific redirects, which your company's IT department is misclassifying. (Imagine that.)

For foreign readers, here's what's going on -- and an easy workaround if your corporate IT folks are blocking the site.
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Here's What's Happening

In response to country-specific takedown orders, Google has devised a new system wherein all Blogspot blogs redirect to country-specific URLs when viewed outside of the US. This way, they can block a site only for that country if needed.

Say for example, that someone in the Canadian government suddenly decided that Canada was pro on-camera, TTL flash. Because that is what Canada is now all about. And putting gravy on french fries, too. 'Cause Canada is also all about the poutine.

So the Canadian government might ask Google to block Strobist because because it espouses manual, off-camera flash. And besides, it never mentions poutine.

With country-specific redirects, Google can block the .ca version only, leaving the rest of the world able to see the site. This is more likely to happen for, say, a Nazi propaganda site and Germany of course. But never underestimate the power of french fries and gravy.


Here's the Workaround

You can stop Google from redirecting to your country's specific version by appending "/ncr" (for "no country redirect") to the site's URL. Thus, you would instead bookmark http://www.strobist.blogspot.com/ncr instead of the normal name.

Go ahead. Try it now. I'll wait.

Or in lieu of that, you could of course not read Strobist during work hours, and instead concentrate on increasing your productivity.

BwaHaHa -- just kidding, lolz.