Hosting a private blog

Webweaving
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I’d like to host a private blog which is supposed to be only accessible to certain people I trust. Do you have recommendations on how to do this?

I saw that Bear Blog offers private blogs, but those seem to be available to everyone who knows the URL and especially robots who ignore the robots.txt. How about a .htaccess file in the directory of a self-hosted site? Would that be enough to keep bots & strangers out?

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It depends whether you need a turnkey hosting such as bearblog / ghost or generate a static website and upload it to a shared web host (or run the server yourself).

.htaccess is indeed the simplest way to implement authentication on a website, if your setup supports it: users will be shown an authentication modal and be denied access if they don’t fill it properly. You can protect a static website, or even a php website this way.

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Pika offers this capability!

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Good ol’ Tumblr still has password-protected secondary blogs

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This is pretty interesting. I’ve been toying with the idea of adding password-protected blogs to Pagecord but I’ve not had anyone ever ask, so I’m not sure of the use case (you can make posts private, but they’re just not indexed and have a private URL). Would this be like a journal but just for friends and family? Maybe I’ll look into it…

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Yes, exactly! That’d be a blog I’d like to share with friends & family without worrying about anyone (or anything) else stumbling over it.

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I know I was the one who asked, but a friend of mine also mentioned https://havenweb.org to me which is made for exactly that purpose.

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Thanks for this. Will definitely look into this for Pagecord, I can see people setting up a second private blog just for this sort of thing (like Havenweb)… cheers!

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