More MySpace Censorship (and how to get around it!)

Whilst Marisa was lurking my MySpace page just now, She found that clicking the link that takes you to my blog here, just takes you straight back to the MySpace homepage. How strange. I thought that perhaps I'd typed the address of my blog in wrong when editing my profile, but when I went back into edit mode, I found that the URL I'd typed in had changed completely to some address at msplinks.com . So I edited my profile back to the original address and saved it again. Only to find the link was changed instantly by MySpace to the same address, which took you back to the MySpace homepage.

So I did a little research. Apparently MySpace started using Msplinks.com to stop spammers leaving comments on your page. Fair enough, but that's no reason to stop me linking to my own blog, even if that blog does exist somewhere outside MySpace's realm of shit advertising. Basically it's just another form of MySpace censorship, and if people are stupid enough to add people who are clearly spammers to their friends list, then they deserve a load of comments spam in my opinion.

But how to get MySpace to link to my blog? Well, it looks like Msplinks.com blocks any links to blogger sites, so the simple answer is to set up a redirect from another site. In my case, I have space at Google Pages, so I set up a fake page there which just included nothing but this script in the body of the page to redirect to my blog:

<script>self.location="URL of your blog here";</script>

Then just link to this page from MySpace instead of your actual blog URL, and you'll be good to go. MySpace, who's the stupid idiots now?

Update: It seems that MySpace have found out about this workaround, and have since blocked it. If MySpace are so serious about censoring it's users, and blocking links to competitors websites (which seems a very childish thing to do), I no longer want to be associated with it. I think I may have found a site that has everything I was looking for in MySpace: Virb, have a look round and see what you think - personally I think it looks a much more friendly, well designed, and less money driven alternative, and I shall be moving there as soon as I've made my profile!