Setting up a bouncer at your door to your blog

I originally started this blog over at Blogger and when I set up my own domain I never did anything with the old site. It’s still hanging out there and I don’t have the heart to delete it. I haven’t updated it in over two and a half years and have moved this blog a couple of times since then. Last year I thought it would be a good idea to write a quick post letting people know where I am now.

Some of the blogs I visit require one to have a Blogger account in order to comment and I wanted to let those people know where to find me. That would be how my unwelcome visitor from last week found my site. He first hit on my Blogger profile and spent a few minutes on the old site before moving on. The link isn’t hyperlinked to my current blog so he (I’m calling him “he” now) had to copy and paste my blog address into his browser. That’s why he seemed to come from out of nowhere.

For some reason he went on to a friend’s blog and decided to play games over there. Even though he linked directly to her from me, he went back to Google and entered some disturbing search strings meant to scare her. That seems to be the only point of his visits because he knew just the right buttons to push and how to get us to take notice. Here’s to hoping a croc makes lunch of his twig and berries so that he may never reproduce.

I think the best way to handle these intrusions from now on will be to ignore them. I’ve made a production out of this because it’s a first for me, but I also think it’s a good reminder to anyone with a personal blog that ANYONE could be out there reading our words. You do know that Australia used to be a penal colony, right?

Wordpress and Blogger hosted blogs have built-in privacy settings that allow users to keep their blogs completely private or to allow only certain users to read them.  If you don’t want to be that radical with restricting access you can still make yourself invisible to search engines.  That way someone typing in phrases they should really be sharing with a therapist won’t accidentally hit on your blog.

If you own a self-hosted blog through a web hosting provider you may have a gatekeeping tool at your disposal in the form of the .htaccess file.  You can deny any IP address access to your blog by inserting just a few lines of code into the .htaccess file.  This site is a good place to familarize yourself with what the file does and where to find it.  After you read that, head on over to this site to snag the code.  You might not need it now, but it’s not a bad thing to store in the ‘ol noggin should you need it later.