Privacy of Blogging

Yesterday night, we discussed about what to blog and what not to.

I found many bloggers treat blog as a private diary and wrote something that they will never tell anybody into the blog. I don’t think it is a good approach.

Blogging is NOT a private diary. Here are some suggestions on blogging:

1. Treat blog as a TOOL. Don’t do something you won’t do because of the tool, and don’t stop doing something you have already be doing because of blog.

2. Blog has to be useful. Useful blog for someone himself/herself may not be helpful to others. It is very common and I encourage people to blog even if it is not so helpful to others if it is helpful to himself. To be helpful to others may not always be helpful to himself. It is also common. In both cases, blogging has some value. If you found it neither helpful to yourself, nor helpful to others, it means the blog doesn’t have too much value, and I recommend you to give up and stop wasting time.

3. Blogging just for blogging? It is good to try new things by starting a blog. It is good. But if you don’t feel it fits your need in some way, the solution is simple: quit blogging, although it may seems cool, hip, fashionable for others.

4. Protect other’s privacy. Privacy is defined (by some source) as the right of not to be known. People can choose whatever he/she want to write about his/her own life, but don’t involve other people’s life. The rule of thumb I use is, ask for permission if you reveals the information for other persons. To tell people what you eat for last dinner is no problem – you can share whatever about yourself, but to share what the other person ate last night seems violating this person’s privacy.

BTW, exposing too much private life without any meaningful impact also does not make too much sense. Just my 2 cents on blogging.

P.S. Technical changes

I hate to fix technical problems now, but I spent about one hour to fulfill my commitment to my friends by fixing the problems they faced. I hosted blogs for other people, including mvm, my Chinese site, claire, elfe, and wendy. Due to the server move, I only successfully moved my Chinese site and mvm to home.wangjianshuo.com and have to leave claire, elfe, and wendy on the old server. So to keep the URL unchanged, I did the following:

Under their folder at home.wangjianshuo.com, upload file as blow:

name:

.htaccess

content:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule (^.*) mirror.php

name: mirror.php

content:

<?php

$BLOG_MAIN_SITE = “http://wangjianshuo.com”;

$BLOG_MIRROR_SITE = “https://home.wangjianshuo.com”;

$entryfile = $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’];

$file = fopen (“$BLOG_MAIN_SITE$entryfile”, “r”);

if (!$file) {

echo “

Unable to open remote file.\n”;

exit;

}

while (!feof ($file)) {

$line = fgets ($file, 1024);

echo $line;

}

fclose($file);

?>

Job is done.

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