Skritter application not loading

connieyu

May 04, 2011 at 05:31 PM posted in General Discussion

Greetings, all.

Please accept my apologies if I am posting to the wrong area of the site, but I am hoping that someone can give insight into a problem that I have not read about here. I am writing on behalf of a colleague.

When trying to use the Skritter drawing application, I am presented with a “Loading…” message, but the application never loads. If I try to visit www.skritter.com I get the following message:

"Looks like the Great Firewall or something like it is preventing you from completely loading www.skritter.com because it is hosted on Google App Engine, which is periodically blocked. Try instead our mirror: www.skritter.cn"

the .cn mirror site works fine, but requires a separate subscription from chinesepod – and I would rather have the application presented in the context of my chinesepod lesson.

I have talked with my school district’s network person in charge of the Internet filtering, and he says that www.skritter.com is not being blocked. There is typically an “Access Denied” screen that displays when one tries to visit a blocked page, but I am not seeing that - only the “great wall” message and the application not loading. But the application loads in my chinesepod pages when I am outside of the school district’s network.

Does anyone have any idea of what might be happening (or not happening) to keep the skritter application from loading within chinesepod – especially if the originating www.skritter.com site is not being actively blocked?

I did see a reference in the help section to enabling skritter in the add-ons tab of the tools page, but I cannot find an add-ons tab. I am logged in as a paid subscriber.

Thank you in advance for any help or insight.

nwinter

May 09, 2011 at 04:33 PM

Ah, thanks David! Glad to hear that it's working again. School networking departments have a tough problem on their hands when it comes to filtering.

If it stops working again, don't hesitate to let me know. The Skritter contact page is a quicker way to get support in the future.

Peace,

--Nick

connieyu

May 09, 2011 at 01:58 PM

Nick,

Thank you for the reply. I apologize for my delay. I have been out of town for the last several days.

And in the interest of full disclosure, I am a friend of Connie's. We work in the same school district, and I am a sort of bridge between the teachers and the technicians.

My post to this forum was after several conversations with and emails to the networking department (responsible for our filtering software and decisions). They assured me that www.skritter.com and appspot were not being blocked - but the behavior you describe makes me think that appspot is being blocked. Or was being blocked. Today, I am happy to report, I am able to visit skrit.appspot.com, www.skritter.com, and the application appears to load correctly within chinesepod.com.

My guess is that the block has been quietly lifted. I will check with Connie and see how things are working, and then post again - if you would like.

Thank you for your quick response and guidance. I am not a language teacher, but I can see great value in skritter!

David Morrow

nwinter

May 05, 2011 at 07:56 PM

Hi connieyu, Skritter developer here. A couple questions here to figure out what's going on:

1) Can you load this CSS file? http://scratch.latest.skrit.appspot.com/css/base.css

2) What browser and operating system are you using?

3) You aren't actually in China, are you?

It may be that your school is blocking appspot.com, where the ChinesePod Skritter Lite app is trying to load data from skrit.appspot.com--that would cause you to see the "Loading..." messages from within your school network.

Hope to get this sorted out for you soon!

--Nick