TechnoSlab

Web based proxies are very useful if you’re behind a restricting firewall and want to access resources otherwise inaccessible. There are countless free web based proxies available on the Internet that can be easily found on proxy listing websites like proxy.org. However, if don’t want to use third party proxy sites because you don’t want to give up your browsing history or login credentials (it’s highly recommend people to avoid logging in to websites when using a proxy hosted on third party servers), then you can host your own proxy. It’s easy because their are many free proxy scripts like Glype and PHP proxy which can be easily installed on a PHP powered server.

This post is for WordPress blog authors willing to setup a proxy on their server for personal use. Repress, short for repressive, is a wordpress plugin which uses PHP Proxy’s engine to render proxified web pages on blog. Setting up and configuring this plugin is extremely easy. Just make sure permalinks are enabled for your blog.

How to Install and configure Repress plugin

1. Go to Settings –> Permalinks –> Enable this option if it’s not already enabled i.e. select any option other than default option. If you own a blog with good SEO ranking a lot of pages index, then I suggest you setup the plugin on a separate WordPress installation sudden change in url scheme of blog posts will effect SEO adversely.

2. Install Repress plugin by going to Plugin –> Add New, search for Repress and click on Install.

3. To configure the plugin, head over to Settings –> Repress and add all domains you want to proxify, to whitelist.

Lets say your blog’s address is yourblog.com, then to render a webpage from youtube.com (youtube.com must be added to whitelist in step 3) you should visit the url http://yourblog.com/proxy/youtube.com

You can find more about this plugin or get it from: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/repress/

That’s it, enjoy circumventing firewalls through a WordPress blog.