Believe it or not, back then in June 2003, I actually intended my blog to be a secret.
* I may blog about sensitive issues that my dear government doesn’t like.
* I may blog about people that I dislike and slam their actions and blamed their moms for giving birth to them.
* I may blog about my ugly nature that others would know and may use it against me.
* I always wanted to put ‘Listening to…’ in my blog but I am afriad that the RIAA suspect I got hold of it illegally.
* I want a private life. I don’t want people to find out that I live in Bukit Batok (a place in Singapore) at all and likes to jaywalk across Street 21.
Tips on how to keep your blog unknown to your colleagues. [Read here too!]
# Use the email blogging feature in WordPress or something. Email to an address and the blog post appears. That way, everytime you blog, you look like you’re just mailing a bunch of text to a client.
# Don’t view your own blog with the nice designs and stuff. Syndicate your blog with an RSS reader. Also syndicate a bunch of news sites and rename your blog’s syndicated feed as New York Times in your RSS reader so that your colleagues don’t know.
# You may want to password-protect sensitive posts. Allow your very close friends to read only and hope that you aren’t working with a bunch of computer experts that can some how bypass your blogging software and land themselves with your MySQL database.
# Use an alias and don’t reverse your name thinking that it’s smart to use that as your secret identity. You watch too much movies. Your blog-crazy colleagues may surf through the internet and somehow chance upon your blog.
# It would come at a point of time that you may be tempted to tell a colleague the address to your blog. Don’t ever do that. “Do you have a blog?” your colleague asked. You answer, “oh yeah, blogs. I’ve been meaning to ask you this – what are these blogs, everyone’s crazy about them.” You can start a crap blog to make your colleague happy but don’t update it with the excuse that your schedule doesn’t allow it.
# Make friends, get linked from people you don’t know. If you’re a Singaporean, link yourself to American blogs. That way you get hits and that’d made you pleased. Don’t call me a sadist here but I always believe that if you bad-mouth your boss or something, it always feels better if more people knows about it. There is always a chance that in a damn-small country such as Singapore, your colleagues knows your friends.
# Always lock your computer. The shortcut key in Windows is ‘Windows button’ + ‘L’. Just lock your machine, no one checks your history. No one browses your RSS feeds. More privacy this way. It’s not only just for the blog; you never know who is evil enough to sabotage your work.
# Don’t ever say bad things about your company. Don’t mention your company’s name if you plan to write about it. Let that be the limit. You don’t want lawsuits to be thrown at you. It’s a preventive measure. There are several company alias that I can suggest you calling. You can either call your company ‘Company A’ or ‘Company X’. You can call your competitor company ‘Competitor Y’ etc.. If your blog gets find out, at least you didn’t write bad things about your company.
For me, my colleagues found out about my blog and I proudly told them I have a slight profit in advertisements because I am too excited about it. And then I got them to click a couple of times for me too of course, lol…
Those colleagues who knows my blog’s existence are my friends. They’re interns like me too, same school, share pretty much the same interest. I let them know my blog. But I never post bad things about my company. I like where I am. Everything’s great here, probably except the automatic doors which for some reason likes to close right in front of me. You know, sometimes your day is bad enough already and then the fucking door refuses to open to let you out of the company – you’ll just feel like smashing it.
This blog post is inspired by Nafcom’s posting on ‘Keep Blogs Secret?’.
Possibly related:
@Mr. Dew: Great, thank you very much!
Now I know that my trackback feature works, thanks for pinging me!!
You wrote:
“Comments:
”
I trackbacked here and it doesn’t seem to be working.
You are wrong, it worked! But you have to watch it from blog’s overview of month,
paralink won’t work.
Quoted:
“# posted by Nafcom @ Sunday, February 20, 2005 1 comments | Trackback (1) secret//blog
by Nafcom (Feb 22, 2005 at 12 AM)Excerpt: How not to let your colleagues know of your blog. Some suggestions.
Weblog: //beconfused Blog
Tracked: 02.21.05 – 7:18 am”
Keep Blogs Secret?
by Nafcom's Crap Blog (Feb 22, 2005 at 12 AM)Well, one of those things I thought about before starting blogging was, wether I should keep my blog secret.
As you might have seen on the links on the left and where I am listed, etc, you might have figured out, that I decided not to keep it secret.
…
Nafcom: Oh, now I see it trackbacked. I guess I was too impatient. I went to check if my trackback is successful after 10 minutes and I see nothing. So I thought the trackback failed again.
by Mr. Dew (Feb 22, 2005 at 1 AM)@Mr. Dew: Trackback pingers give you a report after pinging:
if ‘x’ = error, then;
by Nafcom (Feb 22, 2005 at 1 AM)“0″=No error
“1″=Error.
Nafcom: I do not know how to check that unfortunately, it’s already though.
by Mr. Dew (Feb 22, 2005 at 2 AM)@Mr Dew:
Pretty easy, it is.
by Nafcom (Feb 22, 2005 at 2 AM)I use Wizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger
After you have pressed on “Submit Trackback >” it reports you either ‘0′ or ‘1′.
Nafcom: I use WordPress’ trackback system. I just need to add the address and it’ll trackback the blogs for me and insert my excerpts. Pretty good stuff.
As for pingbacks, it is done by default in WordPress. It pings back every damn thing.
by Mr. Dew (Feb 23, 2005 at 12 AM)@Mr Dew: Ah ok, didn’t know, so it’s an easy-as-pee way!
by Nafcom (Feb 23, 2005 at 1 AM)ah and thanks for your email, replied to it already
… I didn’t know 90% of what just went through in the comments lol. And I never knew you live in BB until you mentioned it just now. I always thought you live in JE lol..
by yingru (Feb 23, 2005 at 2 AM)Nafcom: You’re welcome. It’s quite good that WordPress handles these stuff for you. I think MovableType handles that too.
yingru: We’re talking about trackbacks which is a feature in some blogs. If you blog about something that has inspired you from other blogs, you may want to give them a trackback so that they know about it. Don’t ask me how it works though. I don’t know the technical details, hahaa..
I did mentioned I live in Bukit Batok before. It’s quite a nice place to live in.
Which part of Singapore do you live in by the way?
by Mr. Dew (Feb 23, 2005 at 7 AM)@Mr. Dew: but you don’t think I would switch just because of that, do you?
Nah! I have done too much changes to the template and put too much efforts in it! Today I did another template update! and a big one!
@yingru:The best explaination about what it is (at least for me the best one), I found here
by Nafcom (Feb 23, 2005 at 10 AM)Nafcom: I thought you may want to, hahaa..
by Mr. Dew (Feb 23, 2005 at 11 AM)@Mr. Dew: Nah! I rather would die before doing that!
by Nafcom (Feb 23, 2005 at 7 PM)jurong west.
by yingru (Feb 24, 2005 at 3 AM)