After years of censoring their search results to operate within the law in China it seems that Google might have finally decided to live up to their motto “Do no evil”.
It seems there were some attacks on the gmail accounts of Chinese Human Rights advocates and Google have now decided it’s time for a new approach to China.
Of course if google stops censoring their results they will just be blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”. Baidu, the current number one search engine in China, will take a greater hold of the market. Being a Chinese company there is no chance of them ever returning results the government don’t want the people to see.
Having lived in China I know how difficult it can be to find uncensored news and opinion without employing proxies or vpns to get around the blocking. Google’s censorship however wasn’t 100% and whilst useful things like Google News and Google Cache were unavailable you could still find things the chinese would probably prefer you didn’t see. So the question is; Is no Google in China better than a Censored Google?
It’s a tough one.
Unfortunately because Google don’t use the standard ActiveSync protocols the Mail for Exchange (MfE) system on Maemo doesn’t support it offically.
It seems to be hit and miss, some people say it works fine, others say it doesn’t work at all.
There is however a solution.
Using Nuevasync you can now sync with Google (and other) services. Contacts and Calendar are free, but to get Push Email support you need to pay 25 dollars for a year. One of the nice things about it is the ability to get data from different accounts. I have my contacts come from my gmail account but my calendar comes from a google apps account.
You can sign up for a 5 day trial account (lets you try the email) here. Configuration instructions are available here.
I don’t use it for email myself, but it works perfectly with my contacts and calendar.
I was testing out the Google Sitemap Generator plugin’s compatibility with my Category Subdomains wordpress plugin last night. It forms the links correctly but they all go into one sitemap file.
One minor problem is that Google treats subdomains as separate sites, this means that if you want to use the Google Webmaster Tools you’ll need to setup each subdomain individually in your Google account. Unless Google start supporting *.mydomain.com then there is no way around this.
What may be a bigger problem is that Google’s Webmaster Tools site complains if there are links to a different site in the sitemap file you upload. So if I point google to the http://casualgenius.com/sitemap.xml for the main site, it then moans that there are links to the subdomains in there. What I don’t know is if this moaning serves as a warning so you know there might be errors or if it actually affects how Google treats your site.
What I’ve decided is that I can create a php file that, depending what host it’s being accessed on, can parse the sitemap.xml file on the fly and only pass on the links that are for that host.
If, however, you don’t want to use the Google Webmaster Tools I don’t think either of these issues will be a problem to you.
The second order of business today stemed from the above testing. I did some searching and found a search for Category Subdomains links to older versions from the previous developers. This could be confusing and from version 0.5.1 pretty much the only part of the plugin that is original to the older versions will be the SQL table it uses. So for these reasons I’ve decided to change the name of the plugin to ‘WP Subdomains’.
Category Subdomains is Dead! Long Live WP Subdomains 
