It always galls me how some people think that just because your journal is open, it entitles them to say whatever hateful or unhelpful thing is on their mind when they read your post. They don't get that keeping the blog IS part of our therapy.I write here because I need to get my thoughts down. I get a lot out of just typing up posts, even if I never publish them. I've been writing a lot of drafts this past month. But I want to hit publish and have those drafts become part of the on-going story I've been writing for nearly a year now.
I appreciate supportive comments, but, honestly, I seldom come here looking for advice and I don't mind if people lurk. I lurk a lot on other people's blogs. I do comment sometimes. I like to have this on-line identity, so that when I have something to say I can say it, but I don't like feeling obliged to comment. And I didn't like the feeling I was getting a few months ago, that how many comments I got was more important than the release I felt from putting my feelings and thoughts into words.
So by taking my blog private, I am trying to focus more on me and what I need, and less on what I think other people expect of me.
I am also seriously considering moving over to wordpress and doing a password protected blog, there. Does anyone know if password protected wordpress blogs are easier to follow or show up in feeds? I've been thinking about switching to wordpress for a while now . . . but I'm starting to feel motivated to make it happen. Any tips on how hard that kind of move might be from people who've done it????
This might push my time-line back a little. I'll keep you all informed.
I totally understand the desire for privacy. I actually created two blogs so that I could have one that was totally private, password protected and unlisted and another that is part of the blogging community. Some days I want to connect and others I just want to vent and get my thoughts out without thinking about how they may be perceived. I maintain one on Wordpress and one on Blogger and so far it is working out well. This might be an approach you could try that allows you to still be in the community, if you are still interested in having some contact.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about wordpress, but I occasionally wrestle about going private myself. Can you add me on your list please? My ad is sushigirl 282 at gmail dot com.
ReplyDeleteI set up a lot of Wordpress sites for clients, and Wordpress has the built-in functionality to password protect individual posts or pages, but not the whole site. You would need a membership site plugin for that, but there are plenty of those out there, and many of them are free. But no, your protected content won't show up in the RSS feeds.
ReplyDeleteIf you really want your blog to be private, Wordpress also gives you the option of blocking the search engines from crawling and indexing your site.
This is all self-hosted Wordpress, though, and that would require you to pay for a web host. If you're talking about Wordpress.com, that's a whole other ballgame. They don't offer as many options as the self-hosted version, and some of the options they do offer, you have to pay for.
If they ever get the latest round of DDoS attacks cleared up, I'd recommend moving to Livejournal. Great sense of community, plus a lot of privacy options and the ability to filter who sees each post.