Greg Jessup Blog

So being a developer, I rely on both my smarts and the smarts of others to get the job done.  One of the greatest ways to come up with a solution is using google to search to see how others have done similar things with code, and then crafting your own solution. The problem is many companies block blogspot, wordpress and other blogging urls thus making it impossible for you to access some of the very useful blogs out there. Luckily I run my blog off my own URL so its probably not blocked.

Well after enough frustration, I decided it was time to fix this problem. I spend 10-12hrs a day at the office, I don’t want to wait to get home to figure do my research.

I found a cgi script that acts as an http or ftp proxy from www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/

Because I have a couple of websites up and running I had a readily available cgi-bin directory. I simply dropped the script on my server and WA-LA! I was given a form field which acted as an address bar. If I copy and pasted a blog link into this field, I was taken to the site! AWESOME!

I must mention one more thing. It actually wasn’t quite that simple. Websense was very smart at my company, and probably is at yours as well. When I first ran it, it said “Proxy Avoidence Detected!!”.

Ouch!!!!!!

Well, I obviously was not completely out of luck or I would not be writing this post…now would I?

The very simple solution which popped in my head within about 1 second of getting this error was……

You got it! Run in on a secure channel. HTTPS. This will require a certificate, but this I also already had with my ISP. So all I had to do was forward to HTTPS!

GREAT!!! I’m finally up an running!

After about a week of copying the links I found, Then visiting my https site, then pasting to the input box….I realized this was just too many steps. Ideally I’d be able to right click a link and say “OPEN WITH PROXY HACK” (and that is my next project). However, this was going to require me to learn to write a firefox extension (which i have not done yet).

So I opted for the very simple solution of adding it to my search engine drop down list on the upper right hand corner of Firefox.

Now I simply copy the link and paste it up in my search box and it forwards me to the site.

Here is the code for the FireFox Search Engine….You will just need to..
1) Edit the links.
2) Save the file as ProxyHack.xml (or whatever you’d like it to be.xml)
3) Copy the file to Path to Firefox\searchplugins
4) Restart Firefox!
5) Send me a thank you