Actually not us physically. Our blog has moved.
RoughAndReadyTours.com has been hosted on blogger/blogspot since the beginning. Blogger is simple and works well, and I’m grateful that it helped me start the blog at a busy time when my focus was getting into the mountains and not website hosting.
But it is blocked in China. Rough and Ready Tours does not get into anything political, but other Blogger users do. And although we have our own name, we share our network address with every blog on the most common Western service. So our blog has been consistently unreachable to our friends in China.
It’s not that Chinese people don’t use blogs. Chinese portals like Sina provide hugely popular replicas of blogger and twitter, and since they’re hosted on government-controlled sites, they can operate withouth indiscriminate blocking. But if we moved our blog to one of these sites, our Western readers might have access problems.
I have finally done the research and worked out a good solution. I set up a new server in Hong Kong with the address http://rnrblog.roughandreadytours.net (note the .net and the subdomain – www will also work for now, but I won’t promise it will forever). I installed the leading blogging site software (WordPress) and ported all the content with a few fixes along the way. I have added some additional tools such as a button that lets you submit your email address to a service that sends updates by email. Comments from registered users and visitors will also be allowed as long as I am able to moderate it.
Feel free to bookmark and begin using the new site as it is now operational. Within a few days, I will redirect www.roughandreadytours.com to point to the new site. This is actually trickier than it sounds, because a surprising number of search engines and sites point links to this blog (we get over 50 page views per day). I think I’ve worked out a way to do it with messages that automatically inform the internet of the change, but I can’t promise there won’t be hiccups. Please send any complaints to rnrblog@roughandreadytours.net.
The old site will remain permanently available at http://roughandreadytours.blogspot.com but will not receive any further updates.