>Blogging, Ads and Company Firewalls – A Lesson Learnt

>A number of people read blogs during their workday and I am no exception. Occasionally I will also do some administrative work or edits to posts on this blog. However, when I tried to access my blog from work a few days ago it was blocked and I got the dreaded message that said “Access Denied (content_filter_denied)“. I repeatedly tried accessing it over the next few days and the same message kept coming up. I guess this meant that my blog was now in my companies database of blocked websites. Doh! Off course I couldn’t call my company’s IT help desk and ask that my site be removed from the blocked list, because it is not really work related. So while I can still write blog posts offline, all my online blog work has to wait till I get home. Probably a good thing for my day job productivity. Still I miss the time at work, away from distractions and chores at home, that I used to put aside for blogging related work (lunch times or half an hour before and after work).

I did some research on why my website/blog was being blocked and discovered that it was probably due to the various ads on my site – especially the image based ones. Maybe I also became a bit affiliate marketing crazy and probably had way too many banners, images and other links. Who knows? I don’t have the techie know how to figure out the exact reason and the site seems to be working fine for folks I know at other companies. Finally, it may also be due to the fact that my company is very strict about potential spam/advertising sites – in so far that even Yahoo and Google based site (like mail, finance etc) are blocked because of this – so it was only a matter of time before my site got caught.

The one good point out of all this is that it has made be more disciplined about blogging given I can only really do it at home and that I need to balance it with family time. As other bloggers know, you can easily spend 2-3 hours on blog related activities before you know it. Also, from a marketing perspective I need to ensure my site keeps the focus on content and less on ads. After all I am sure a number of my readers check this blog from their work places and I don’t want to get on the banned list there!

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