Block Breaker: Google Reader's Difference From Thunderbird

In China, it seems that Blogger.com’s domain blogspot.com is blocked. This means billions of people are deprived of the chance to view billions and billions of blog posts around the world. For me, this is very annoying because many technicians I admire are Blogger users.

The fun side is that using Google Reader, I can see the posts I love again. How this happens? Let’s compare Google Reader to Thunderbird.

When you add a RSS source to Thunderbird and start to read the posts, it is in fact Thunderbird who connects to the source and downloads the content. As a requirement, your PC must have access to the source. That’s why I cannot read Blogger.com in Thunderbird. However, Google Reader does things in a different way. The posts are in fact downloaded by Google servers in background. Then content is sent to your browser by AJAX. Haha, as Google runs Blogger, its servers have full access to Blogger.com’s RSS sources or sites like FeedBurner (now also part of Google). So, I can read those interesting posts now.

However, this workaround sometimes fails. That’s because some authors choose to publish a compact RSS source, so you can only see portion of the posts. Hallvard, a Delphi guru, has a compact RSS source. Wish he could change the settings one day so I can fully enjoy his wonderful reports on Delphi.