Disable RSS feeds

RSS feeds are like bookmarks on crack with home delivery service.

Many RSS feed readers now publish pages of shared items or make your clips available publicly unless you tell them otherwise.

If your "trolls" have previously found you and know the screen names of your readers, then they can monitor the RSS feeds of that person to find your new url.

Are We Walking A Fine Line With All This Openness?

Are We Walking A Fine Line With All This Openness?

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watch clicking on links from your own page

looking for an easy way to follow all the blogs I read, i loaded up my sidebar with links. THe theory was that when I was away, i could just visit my site and then click the links. when you follow a link it sends a referrer to the page you are arriving at that basically tells the owner of the arrival page from whence you came. Actually any page you visit in the same browser window directly after your blog will send your page as the referrer.

Firefox has an extension which allows you to send no referrer. This is only helpful for links that you follow from your page. Other people following links on your page still send your page as the referrer.

So what's a girl to do?
1. view your blog and then close the window. Use a new window to continue surfing.
2. put your links on another page that does not link back to your original site.
3. put the link to that new page in the sidebar where your links formally resided.

You could also try a service like blogrolling or bloglines which keeps a list of your links for you.

Sign up for the new Blogger BETA

Blogger BETA accounts apparently have the ability to control who has access to/can read your blog. check out their info page

watch the links YOU post on your site.

if you link to pages that have counters of their own, when someone follows that link to the new page, your site (addy and all) is listed on their counter as a referring page.

explore the options

truthfully, i like BLOGGER. it's simple to use but can be made as stylistically out there as you'd like and it's free. i don't feellike there are strings attached or levels of membership.

that said...
there are other blogging/journaling communities out there. some i have discovered allow you to set permissions or create groups that are allowed to see your posts. that's a nice feature if you want to restrict your readership.
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Update 10/2008
Blogger now has this feature!

and in the end there may not be much you can really do

there are all sorts of services to allow people to surf anonymously...
i used one to visit my site a little while ago. i'm waiting to see what if anything shows up on the counter. i'll let u know what i find.
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UPDATE:
I don't find any peep on the counter page from my anonymous visit.
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UPDATE 2:
apparently some counters do track anon visitors. test yours by visiting your page from a local library going thru an anoymizer site.

Give me all your cache!

Google (and other search engines) take a "snapshot" of your webpage to allow users the chance to see your site if your server is down (and even after you have deleted it).

check out this article on google about how to keep your site from being cached.

There is also a link to submit a request to have your cache deleted sooner.


KUDOS to eclipse for the tip!

Other profile tips

many people on their profiles seem to be trying to be anonymous and then link to other items such as a personal webpage or display their email addys or IM screen names. If these are things that people IRL know about (such as an email addy) they can identify you from that info.

remember there are a ton of free email services. get yourself an account that you just use for "anonymous" things like blogger or such.

sign up for an additional IM account with a service. If oyu regularly use yahoo IM and you sign up for a msn messenger account you can use a program like FIRE to monitor both IM accounts at the same time so oyu won't miss messages from either group of friends.

Links

If you have been lax about following or implementing some of the previous suggestions, one thing you can do to limit the traffic to your blog is to ask people not to put links to your site on their site.

If prying eyes know the blogs you frequented, even if you move it, they would be able to follow someone's link to you--this includes links on the template and links in the blog itself that may go to a specific post.

there is a service that helps you check who links to you (www.wholinkstome.com).

watch out for other services

when i say other services i mean things like blogrolling, or those counters or other nifty little addons to your blog. many of those services make you give them your url. you may want to take a gander at their privacy policies to find out what will be done with the info. check to see if you can opt out of any public listings they may have of sites that use their service.

don't be a dumb azz

My name is sansanity and i am a blogging dumb azz.

On two occassions people have discovered my blog by reading my screen!

1. do not walk away from your computer with your blog on the screen.
2. do not look at your blog at work because someone just has to see the title and then search for it (if you haven't thusly protected yourself by making your blog invisible to indexers)
3. if someone else will have access to your computer, you may want to empty the history and cache of your browser. someone only has to begin typing a url and my browser suggests urls it has already visited and tried to autocomplete. someone sees and interesting one in the list and WHAMO!
   
   you can take it a step further by setting your screen saver to only be deactivated by password, etc. to prevent accidental intrusion.
   
   

your virtual world and your real world should not mix

I once mentioned that I blogged and mentioned some topics from my blog and web search savy friend was able to find it.

And when i say do not mention your blog IRL, i mean:

• do not mention the nicknames and urls of blogs you regularly read and comment on (unless ofcourse you have followed the prevfious tip of not listing your blog in your profile)
• do not mention topics you discussed on your blog (unless ofcourse you ahve stopped the crawlers from indexing you)

images

I found out a blogger's real name because of a picture on the blog. the picture was used as a background image which was hosted on the blogger's personal webspace with their ISP. most ISP's make your personal webspace address include your user id which is usually your name. Because i could read the code on the page, i could read the location which included the name of the blogger.

Even using blogger's picture service can leave you open. another blogger posted a picture of his son. he ofcourse used no names in the post, but the image file was named with his son's name. before you upload your pictures, rename them something generic like picture 1, picture 2, etc.

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Also a note about hosting images on blogger...

now this may have changed, but a few months ago i deleted a picture from a blog post, but i found that if i still typed in the url that goes directly to the image, the image was still there (the url you will get if you right click on an image and select "view image" or "copy image location") There is currently no way for the blogger to completely obliterate the image. The reality is that most people aren/t going to take the time to look at the image addys, but better safe than sorry.

your template

you can modify your template so that the crawlers out there don't index your blog. you may think, who would index my blog? well Google for one, since they offer their own blog search engine. blogs have become an incredibly great way for marketers and people to judge what the public is thinking. and anyone who types in something that you mentioned in your blog would find it if it's been indexed. i once said i had a crush on Leland from DOG the Bounty Hunter and got lot's of hits from people looking for info on him and the show.

so how do you keep the creepy crawlers from indexing your site? Blogger will tell you how here .
(actually you have to follow a link on that page, but the page is a nice intro).

Setting preferences

When you are setting up the preferences, disable RSS feeds (it will keep people from viewing your site with an RSS reader which may not leave you their ISP info even if you have counters on your blog.

Also, choose "no" for the setting "add your blog to our listings," so that even if people visit your profile page, they do not see the blog listed.

You can take the added step of choosing not to share your profile.

Choosing a good blog name

It's a good idea when you create a blog that you want to make difficult to find that you choose an unlikely url/name. Don't use your name or your nickname. I wouldn't use anything related to your real life. I'd even go so far as to suggest a random set of characters like qlfjkbva.blogspot.com.