Access Denied

The Sneeze is the latest of the sites that I visit regularly to be added to the banned list at work. Now I just get redirected to an internal page with the header ‘Internet Access Denial’ and a description of how to go about getting it allowed should there be a business reason. I don’t know how they decide to ban sites, whether it’s a general thing, or whether they track people and block them when some trigger is reached. I must have visited my own site, and some others, far more often than The Sneeze, but it got banned, not them, wierd. I don't even know if it's our IT department who do the banning or whether they have some external service that does it for them. The banning of The Sneeze follows on from the banning of Photo Matt and Kottke, I'm not sure if these sites should be outraged, or proud.

Obviously I have a back-up plan; a little proxy on one of my sites that allows me to reach any site by typing in the address and getting it to request it instead. Unfortunately, due to the way it works, it means I see most sites without styling as their CSS files are linked relative to the page (a very good reason for using complete URLs for your CSS files, images too).

I don’t know how or why they're banning these sites (apart from them not being work-related), but I do know it’s very annoying and, obviously, criminal to stop me accessing the wonderful content they produce.