The price of fame it seems is to not be able to access your own website at your place of work.
I got in this morning, and fired up my computer, started Outlook and opened Internet Explorer… Hrmm, funny, my home page is not usually websensed?!! To explain, in order to do my job, I have put a load of links I use on a day to day basis on my relevant links page. When I first set this up, my website averaged perhaps three men, a delinquent child, and a deranged dog visiting it. Now, it is considerably more. And I seem to have now landed so much success that the fun police at Websense have found me and categorised.
I am now listed thus:
Reason: The Websense category “Personal Web Sites” is filtered.
URL: http://shepline.com/
Still, not to get me down, I write to them, in my capacity as Thomas Shepherd of Shepline Publishing, politely informing them that “It has been reported to me that our website is being blocked in some institutions […] This category is incorrect. The nature of our business is “Publishing/Publishing Services” and our core business is that of Writing, Visual Arts, and Website Design (not including hosting).”
Quite, what will become of this I don’t know, and I do hope that it is just a result of me signing up a listing somewhere or the number of hits via search engines, and not as I fear, some pathetic little sod down in IT support asking to have it classified in order to filter it rather than politely contacting me asking me access it less. Ah well, time will tell, I guess…
Edit: Hah! In the course of writing this email, I had a reply from the bods at Websense…
The site http://shepline.com has been reviewed and the categorization has been changed to Business and Economy. This update should be available in the next publication of the database.
I doubt somehow that Blackwell’s will be filtering “Business and Economy”… ^__^
