Checklist for webmasters in Pakistan after blocking of youtube.com

In th second week of September, 2012, PTA has blocked access to youtube.com in Pakistan by asking ISPs to block access to the website. It is not clear what procedure is adopted by the ISPs to block Youtube. I think all the ISPs in Pakistan have used their own policy and mechanism to block these services. This has resulted in different kind of blocked reports from different users. e.g many users were reporting that they were able to access the youtube through secure http protocol ( https ). At this time on 23rd September, youtube is not accessible through https on PTCL and others network. ( I can confirm 

The widely used Gmail services have not seen any services interruption yet. However, Google Maps, Google Drive and google plus have been inaccessible most of the times.

This is yet to ascertain how much loss has happened to Google and local business that are using Google services. May be we have some data in near future on this.

One of the services that is inaccessible is Google Analytics. Almost all of the websites embed a java script code that helps the Google analytics software to show website traffic analytics to website admins. The java script code used to be in the footer of the websites, but in the latest version of Google analytics the the recommended way to embed the code was in header. Also, the javascript file is accessed from web address apis.google.com.

As a website visitor when someone goes to the website the browser keep its status transferring until all the page content is loaded. As the Google analytics file is not loading on user's computer the browser keep showing the in-progress status. This means the page load time increases to more than 2 minutes in most of the cases. In addition to long page load times some of the java scripts does not get executed that are required for various interactions on the website.

So, in order to keep the website functional the webmaster need to remove the Google analytics javascript, Google Plus javascript file and any other files that are not being loading at this time.

I have studied various files in BrightSpyre.com that are being loaded from Google servers. We have commented out Google analytics code and now the page load time has come back to normal. Also in some pages jquery code was not executing and that pages have started working smoothly.

We still running Google adsense and Google ads managment software on BrightSpyre.com. However, both of these services use a different web address ( googleadservices.com and googlesyndication.com, googleapis.com) and run smoothly without any page blocking.

Do We Vote Map- Elections Mapping in Pakistan

Cross posting from my blog post at www.pakreport.org/dowevote blog

Higher turnout makes the democratic governments more strong, and at the same time makes Governments more accountable to the people of the country.

In any democratic system voters Turnout is the most common and probably most important component of the individual’s participation in the Political process. Economic, demographic, cultural, natural, technological and institutional factors effect the voters turnout in a country. However, one agreeable fact is that higher voters turnouts provide legitimacy to the elections and Governments

In recent Egypt elections more more than 70% of the voters participated in the first and second stage of the elections. That shows the will of the people to drive change in the country. Today, Pakistan is at a very crucial stage in its very short democratic life span. History has shown that most of the people in Pakistan do not take part in the elections; showing their lack of belief in the change through electoral process. In Pakistan, the highest voters turnout(55%) was observed in 1955 elections.

As maps with the interactive statistics are the right tools to tell story on the Internet today, our team compiled 2008 National assembly data and created the interactive chart to show how many percent of voters take part in elections in 2008 and launched http://www.pakreport.org/dowevote. You can zoom the map to the district level to see how many of us take part in the electoral process from each part of Pakistan.

The map shows the parts of the country where voters turnout ranges from 12.8% (Bajur Agency) to 67.33% (Bhakkar) percent.

Our efforts are to demonstrate that low voters participation is not a path forward to change in our country. Higher participation of the common people in the elections and steps of the Government to make voting easy for every one are the key factors to sustain democracy in Pakistan. DoWeVote map is first effort and we need your involvement and feedback to take this step forward.

We hope we will see more active participation from people of Pakistan in electoral process and higher voter turnouts in next elections!