Besides this blog, I have another one that I use as a private blog. I had that blog long before this one. In it, my wife and I write about our kids and family events, post pictures, and will soon post videos. When I created it, I decided to make it private to prevent the entire world from peeking at our personal lives.
A while back there was a debate in the blogosphere about what a blog is. Robert Scoble initially said a private blog is not officially a blog. Others disagreed.
Since I had a private blog, I totally disagreed. Scoble has since changed his mind due to apps such as Vox being released by Six Apart. I have thought about getting a blog with vox, but for some reason, I feel the need to keep my own blog using Wordpress so I can do whatever I want with it. Perhaps I will get one in the near future to find out what mine is missing.
Although I disagreed, I did dislike some things about a private blog. The way I set it up prevented it from being syndicatable. Being able to syndicate a blog is the biggest advantage, I believe, of blogs. I still have it set up this way and I am bugged by it. Therefore, this weekend, I am modifying my private blog to make registration required which will make it so friends and family can subscribe.
Since I am changing how my private blog is accessed, I thought I would document how I did it in case others are interested. It’s simple and very effective for sharing personal information with friends and family.
- Download the latest Wordpress blogging software.
- Create a robots.txt file in the root of you web server to disallow search engines from indexing your site (details).
- Create a .htpasswd file if you are using an Apache web server (tutorial).
That’s it! It’s a simple solution. For those of you who aren’t technical and don’t want to maintain your own blog but still want a private solution, check out Vox. I have heard great things about it.
Comments
I’ll have to try Vox if I decide I need a private blog sometime… for all those “inappropriate” drawings and stuff. I guess you’ll let me know if there’s something new I have to do to get to your family site.
One thing you might like trying with Vox is the fact that it’s got really good tools for inserting media like Flickr photos (even your private photos!) and YouTube videos, and then you can control privacy/permissions on each item.
I’ve seen my friends use this to blog about a trip on a post that’s readable by anyone, but the pictures of their kids are only visible by people who are their friends. Plus, there’s no limit to the number of friends you can have, so you don’t have to worry about having to pay if you have more than a handful of contacts.
You can even insert posts from your other blog into Vox — it might be a nice way to complement your main blog. I’ve had a public blog for about 8 years that’s powered by Movable Type, but for simple, fun posts or stuff that’s too silly for the whole world to read, Vox has really made blogging a lot of fun again.
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