I've hit the big time! (and a useful tip for liberal bloggers)

Wow, folks -- I feel that in the last day or so I've kind-of "broken in" to Liberal Blogistan: I've been linked by both Shakespeare's Sister and Sisyphus Shrugged, linkage which is immensely appreciated. But the even greater badge of honor came when I logged into my YACCS comments control board and found a comment left on an old post, on the subject of right-wing bloggers blocking referral traffic from liberal blogs (a practice which, I continue to note, is limited exclusively to right-wing blogs). In a move that fills me with glee, Jane Galt (the blogger in question on the commented post) blocked my referral! Imagine: the libertarian genius whose blog traffic dwarfs mine (as of this writing, according to the counter on her main page her total number of hits exceeds mine by over 2,400,000 hits) feels the need to add me to her list of blocked referrals. Looks like a victory for Mighty Mouse!

(Yes, I'm Mighty Mouse in this scenario.)

However, Ms. Galt appears to have not really mastered the fine art of referral-blocking; maybe she should bone up on the Instruction Manual that the LGF guy wrote when he pioneered the trick. The links from the individual post-pages (I also linked that Galt post here) are blocked, but they're not blocked from the monthly archive page, here -- scroll down to the posts (Saturday, September 5) and see. As of this writing (about 10:30 p.m. Eastern time) the links still work from the monthly archive. Whoops.

But anyway, it doesn't matter, because there's an easy way for us liberal bloggers to get around this, and as a service to my fine liberal brethren, here's how it works. Instead of using the URL to the right-wing blog post in question when creating your link, first take this string:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=

Then, you simply append the post URL to the end, immediately after the equal-sign. So, if you're going to link Byzantium's Shores, instead of linking this URL:

http://byzantiumshores.blogspot.com

...you'll actually link this URL:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://byzantiumshores.blogspot.com

What you've just done is create a redirect through Google, which according to my brief experimentation with SiteMeter and this blog, shows up as a hit but one with an unknown referring URL. Likewise, I doubt Technorati would pick it up as a link. And besides, no blogger is going to be insane enough as to block referrals from Google, right?

So there you go, liberal bloggers -- break free of the traffic-blocking shackles! Link whomever you desire!