One great solution to the problem of censorship, however, would be to inform your readers of ways to get around the internet censorship in China before you switch. Point them to Tor, Anonymouse , Public Proxies or your solution of choice.

Once you’ve made the switch create a Feedburner feed for your blog. Feedburner feeds, unlike the feeds WordPress.com creates for your blog, are not blocked in China.

I took a look at the Engtech blog. I am having a bit of trouble figuring out how he did a lot of things there. The home page was probably with tables and such, but the header links seem like a challenge to me.

Case in point, I wrote a program to download category information and create an HTML tag cloud that you then cut-and-paste where ever you want.

That’s the entire magic of my hacks… automatically processing info from WP.com and generating HTML code off of it.

If you are tired of the headaches of maintaining your own WordPress blog, and you just want to get back to the basics, WordPress.com is awesome.

But remember, it has some serious limitations. You have a 50 MB file storage size restriction. More will cost you. Host a few videos, MP3, or podcasts here and you will fill that up fast. There is almost no styling permitted within the post content area, which I mention above. There are a lot of other limits, but there are a lot of other reasons to blog here. Simplicity and focusing on the blogging and not the toys is a good reason.

As for the CSS on my blog, since all CSS in the CSS Extra package is restricted to the styles of the blog, not the content within it, it’s not much. A few colors in the backgrounds, headings, and so on. Very little. I like to keep this blog simple looking, featuring the text and content not the clutter. But thanks for noticing.

I’d sure like to dig into the template tags and do some fixing in there, though. That part really makes it hard for me to keep blogging here sometimes. It’s the price you pay for free.