How To Get Around Network Censorship

One of the most important part of my computer is it’s internet connection. I use the internet a lot, and without it life becomes so much more dull. There is one thing worse than having no internet - a crippled internet. My boarding school here in Singapore blocks out a lot of websites and ports that I feel is unnecessary  and that it actually hampers the internet experience.

In my boarding school I can get 2 networks, one is my school’s internet network and the other is my boarding schools network. There are 3 different kinds of programs used to censor out and block the internet - Fortiguard, Trend Micro Interscan and another unnamed software. These 3 firewalls seriously makes life hard on us boarders by blocking out some innocent sites and some much needed ports. Friendster, Facebook, Youtube, Filestube are blocked. The firewalls are so strict that even some advertisements on websites are blocked. This is what I’ll call an overkill.

Here are the two software products that I have found and personally tested that can bypass internet censorship whilst providing anonymous surfing:

Note: These 2 programs can bypass and get around fortiguard. Personally tested.

Ultrasurf

UltraSurf is the flagship software product from UltraReach Internet Corp. for Internet anti-censorship. This was one of the first anti-censorship software I have ever used, however the recent versions of it has been blocked in my boarding school. Oh well, all good things have to come to an end.

Features:

• It is a green software (meaning no installation - just start and surf)
• Small download size
• Proxy speed is fast compared to other web-based proxies
• Supports most if not all of a normal internet users needs (implements almost all browser functions)
• Can use Internet Explorer without having to configure anything, however if you want to use any other browser, some tweaking would have to be done

Homepage | Download page

GlobalPass (aka GPass)

GPass is now my favourite software I use to bypass network censorships. It is even better at getting around network censorships when compared to Ultrasurf. The speed of it’s proxy server is even faster and the connection more stable too.

Features:

• It is a green software (meaning no installation - just start and surf)
• No need to configure individual software to bypass the firewalls, just drag the icon of the software into GPass and it’s ready to go
• It’s speed is fast
• Small download size

Homepage | Download page

I hope that this 2 softwares help out other people who are facing internet censorship out there, especially students in boarding schools like me. Xp. I might be doing one comprehensive post about GPass one of these days.

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How To Highlight Author Comments In Wordpress Without Using Plugins

You’ve seen blogs where the author’s comments are highlighted, and I bet you would have thought that it was pretty cool. Besides the cool factor, highlighting your (authors) comments can be extremely useful as it helps you build your authority factor and helps first time visitors know who the administrator is.

Having seen how useful highlighted author comments were in other blogs, I set out in search for the solution that will let me do the same. Yes, I found many plugins to do the job, however, I don’t like installing Wordpress plugins for unnecessary things like this which can be hard coded into the template.

After looking around a bit I found Matt Cutt’s post really clued me in on what to do. Matt Cutt’s version works, however I think the way I did it below is easier to understand. What I did was to insert a php code into the comments template that checked every comment to see whether the author ID was 1 (It is 1 for me as my author ID is 1, most blogs should leave it at 1) and if it were to print the words authorcomment, if it wasn’t it would print visitorcomment.

Note: I check the comment to the author ID, so if your author ID is not 1, please change the number to your own author ID. Also, this method is not the only method by which you can hard code author highlighting into the template, but this is one of the simplest.

First of all, open your comments.php template, then look for the block of code below. It won’t be exactly the same for different themes, but it should be close enough though.

<?php if ($comments) : ?>
    <h3 id="comments"><?php comments_number(’No Responses’, ‘One Response’, ‘% Responses’ );?> to &#8220;<?php the_title(); ?>&#8221;</h3>

    <ol class="commentlist">
        <!–the beginning of one comment–>
    <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

        <li>
            <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
            <br />

            <small><?php comment_date(’F jS, Y’) ?> at <?php comment_time() ?></small>

            <?php comment_text() ?>
            <div class="divider"></div>

        </li>

    <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

    </ol>

After that look for the <li> before the start of your comments and replace it with:

<li class="<?php if ($comment->user_id == 1) echo "authorcomment"; else echo "visitorcomment" ?>">

The end result should be below:

<?php if ($comments) : ?>
    <h3 id="comments"><?php comments_number(’No Responses’, ‘One Response’, ‘% Responses’ );?> to &#8220;<?php the_title(); ?>&#8221;</h3>

    <ol class="commentlist">
        <!–the beginning of one comment–>
    <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

        <li class="<?php if ($comment->user_id == 1) echo "authorcomment"; else echo "visitorcomment" ?>">
            <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
            <br />

            <small><?php comment_date(’F jS, Y’) ?> at <?php comment_time() ?></small>

            <?php comment_text() ?>
            <div class="divider"></div>

        </li>

    <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

    </ol>

OK, now with that done, all you need to do is to assign a style via css to style up all comments with the class “authorcomment”. Open up style.css template, then insert this line:

li.authorcomment{background:#000000;color:#ffffff;}

The line above gives a black background and white text to all of the your comments. If you want to change it, just change the code in between the 2 curly brackets and you’ll be fine.

Go change your theme now to get these cool highlighted author comments . Do you guys do it differently? Any suggestions?

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Tutorials

As a web designer and coder, one thing I really appreciate are tutorials as they help me learn new and useful stuff. Be it on web designing, coding, or just programming things, they are extremely useful. Because of this, I thought it would be nice if I could give back to the internet community a bit by writing my own tutorials here and posting it online.

Tutorials I would write about are probably things that I’m proficient such as Photoshop, Flash, Xhtml, Wordpress coding. Things like that. Besides that’, I’ll also post other kinds of tutorials which actually are more like “how-to’s”.

I hope this category “Tutorials” will be useful to anybody who so happens to stumble onto it . So with this post, “Tutorials” is now officially open.

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