Here's a thing I found just now. Try to go to a Blogspot blog that's not in your own country, and Google, may they rot in a place of much smelly rottenness for a large portion of eternity, will try to redirect you to the same URL but with the domain code changed to your own local one. So it gets changed, for me, from
http://www.username.blogspot.com/
to
http://www.username.blogspot.co.uk/
which, quite bloody obviously, ain't gonna lead anywhere, and I end up being served a "page does not exist" notification.
To stop it doing that, copy the link to your browser's URL bar instead of clicking it, and add ncr (stands for No Country Redirect) to the end, so that you have
http://www.username.blogspot.com/ncr
and it'll take you to the correct URL. (Or if it's a blog you have bookmarked, of course, you'll want to edit the URL in the bookmark.)
I think, but don't quote me on this, that after you've changed it once, it'll happily carry on not redirecting Blogspot URLs until the Blogspot cookie runs out of date, or—obviously—until you clean your cookies folder.
—Daz
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Daz, it’s not Google wot’s doing it. I just tried your links on my browser (Google Chrome) and they all go to where they’re s’posed to. Curious I tried the same thing in Firefox and yep – the .com became .co.uk.
Naughty, naughty Firefox.
Google touts this as a feature:
So if you read between the lines, Google is technically following country-specific ordinances while granting users the option to circumvent them. Twitter does the same thing by letting users change their country settings on a per session basis.
And that—as Martha Stewart would say—is a good thing.
Remigius
Weird. I tried it in Chrome and did get redirected.
Ron
You’d think they could provide something as obvious as a “This link leads to a blog outside your country/domain. Do you wish to continue?” button. Automatically redirecting to a URL that in all likelihood won’t even exist is, well, kinda silly.