I like about BONTB is its short posts. Seriously, I hate to read long blog posts and I still don't understand why I wrote those lengthy ones. Short blog posts make it easy to read and the topic is clearer compare to composite posts. It's also easier for commenting and skimming.

I also like BONTB for providing free blogging help. Yes, you can Ask Bontb! This is a free service similar to what I'm providing right here on my blog. You can ask me for blogging help, or any type of help here. The difference is that BONTB provided the service as a contact form (private email) and he manually publish what he think worth saying. While my service is provided using the existing comment form (public message).

The greatest thing about BONTB is that he is very open minded and honest person. I still remember the last time thanks to him I bought a few PR4 and 5 domain names. Well, I still haven't make those domain active yet and actually haven't made any bucks from them. But if you need a cheap but high-value domain name you may consider to Ask Bontb.

BONTB blog provide many type of useful information. As a matter of fact, it worth visiting so much that I subscribed to his blog on my Google Reader couple of weeks ago. His category list is rather long and I haven't got enough time to dig trough all of those.

Oh, I shouldn't forget to mentioned that BONTB blog dofollows comment author link (no nofollow attribute) so it's a great place to discuss and get rewarded with Link Popuarity and PageRank juice.

I hope this icebreaker blog post will open my fingers up for typing more great posts. Meanwhile, I still am waiting for the new blog design to come out, so Brian, hope you do a good work over there.

Lastly, please ignore this test paragraph for spam links. Own domain name is very good for making blog. Internet Explorer is not as good a browser as Mozilla Firefox.

Finally I got the time and motivation to follow up on a post earlier called China Internet Speed too Slow or Just DSL Slow? . Thanks to Alex, a visitor who left a question on that post. You will find in this articles:

• Why is it slow?
• How to make it faster?

Update: I got a better solution: VPN Solution (click to read more).

Why is it slow?

Why broadband in China too slow? The reason... bottleneck at the trunk line to International Websites, especially to America. I found my own IP is located in Bejing while I'm staying in ZhongShan, which is thousands of km away from Bejing. Far enough to say... "too far".

I have been wondering this in mind "Why is it so slow" when surfing international websites in Vietnam and China. I had an Australia proxy, which generally give me full speed access to those sites, but with no proxy, the connection is terrible.

Then one day, while searching for "Australian Proxy", I stumbled upon this page: Australia Proxy for those having connection problems by Reaper-X. From that page, I realized why the Internet speed is so slow when connecting to most international web sites.

The recent connection problem in Asia region is caused by recent earthquake in Taiwan, as Reaper-X pointed out. As much as I know, the earthquakes also destroyed many undersea fiber optic cables in Vietnam, causing a bottleneck for the Internet traffic going in from and out to Website hosted outside the country.

A visitor, Alex raised the issue up again, and this time his connection is ADSL. So basically, what I learn is that not only DSL is too slow, but also ADSL is too slow. In this case, Alex has a 3MB ADSL plan and he is complaining about the speed.

I've been complaining about this too much, and now I have to accept the only one solution to it. Why? Even the 3MB ADSL have the same problem, what can my little 512Kb DSL do? Unfortunate enough, The 4MB plan I mentioned earlier isn't available in my area.

How to make it faster?

The only fix available for me now is to use Australian proxies.

I've been using one Australian proxy 165.228.131.12:80. If you don't know what it mean then here is the breakdown:

• IP address: 165.228.131.12
• Port number: 80

The proxies that work

For as long as I can remember, that was the only proxy that worked for me. I've tested too many and none of them worked. Until recently after reading Reaper-X article, I found 3 more proxies which do work:

1. 165.228.128.10:3128
2. 165.228.130.10:3128
3. 165.228.132.10:3128

Testing the proxies

I test those proxies against Lorelle's "Taiwan Earthquake Disrupts Internet Access" and here are the results:

Winner of the test: proxy 165.228.132.10:3128

Interesting facts

• In fact, without using proxies I can only open Google.com.
• With proxies, Google.com will block my IP and ask for entering confirmation code.
• Google come up slower when proxy is used.

How to use proxy

On Internet Explorer:

1. Open Tools menu > Internet Options;
2. Open Connections tab > LAN settings (near bottom of the dialog box);
3. Look for proxy server, enable the "Use proxy server for LAN";
4. Enter the IP Address and port number there;
5. Click "Advanced" button, enter google.com into the exception list.

On FireFox:

1. Open Tools menu> Options... ;
2. Open Advanced tab > Network tab > Connection group > Settings... button;
3. In "Connection Settings" form, select "Manual proxy configuration";
4. Enter the proxy IP address into HTTP Proxy box, and port number in to port box.
5. Enter google.com into the "No proxy for" box.

Caution: to avoid all the trouble, remember to bypass proxy for google.com.

What's next

Update: I got a better solution: Strong VPN (click to read more).

I hope the solution here fix your problems with the slow internet speed in China. Every visitor to my website is valuable and the motivation for me to continue providing quality articles.

If you have same problem. If you find this article help. If you need some more information. If anything, please feel free to contact me by sending me an email, or leave a comment here and I will attempt to follow up immediately.

Introduction

Here is an overview of what happened.

8 months ago I wrote 2 articles and submitted it to EzineArticles.com. Then I forgot about them. 2 months ago I revised the articles and... 1 got rejected, 1 got re-published. I didn't really care. Until... today

The point here is that recently I receive around 20+ page view from this page: Guide - How To Install IIS on Windows XP SP2 Without CD to the page on my site. I was so surprise about it. I abandoned the article a while ago. I renamed it once to Guide: Install IIS on Windows XP SP2 without CD and renamed it's URL also.
The ignorance thing is that previously I renamed the URL and didn't care much. When I realized I got 404 error hits everyday to this page, I started questioning myself.

The investigation

Today I visit EzineArticles.com to investigate the incident. I suspected my article is listed somewhere in a popular section. And really it was. It is listed in this section: "Most Viewed EzineArticles in the Computers-and-Technology:Software Category (90 Days)"

At the time I check, it got this status:

This article has been viewed 2540 time(s).
Article Submitted On: September 15, 2007

The lesson learned

We should write more quality articles and submit to the popular article directory. Blog is good but it's won't be as good as that.

The only caution is that, being on an article directory mean you have lost that article forever. Why?

• Visitors are going to EzineArticles.com to read my article instead of going directly to my website. Out of this, only a small portion take the time to quickly look at the original page than leave. They found nothing interesting.
• The article directory definitely have higher page rank than you. So your article being published on your site will be in the Google supplementary result and never... or barely get clicked through from Google search result page.

How to do it the right way? Remember that you are allowed to have 3 active links in your source box.

• Write an abstract version of your article, which meet the word count, and submit it instead of your original article.
• Write highly crafted author bio, which will attract the reader attention, but not a spammy type.
• Keep a link to your homepage (this definitely is most stable address)
• Keep a link to your article hosted on your website, a perfect URL that stays for life.
• If possible keep the 3rd link point to your other site, which you want to promote.
• THE ULTIMATE (This should be a secret, but i'm sharing with you): Promote your article on the directory as well as the one on your site. This way will make that article become popular and stay in the list spreading through-out the category and give you an overwhelming traffic as well as a share of Google PageRank.

What's next?

Go along with me for the learning journey. I will share with you whatever I learn, even the most secret techniques. Subscribe to my RSS feed and stay tune for updates. I will follow up on the "Major Issue with Common Blog Layout". For now I need some relaxation, playing mahjong with the family.

Update 15/03/2008: I just realized I you may want to learn some Article Tips and Writing Tips from Open Tips.