Private blog… to password protect or not?

Essentially making it so that no one will [k]no[w] the site/blog exists

Hmm… Keep it on your own computer, never show it to anybody. Better: on paper and in a locked drawer ??
Seriously, there is no such thing as “private” once it is published on the internet.

Understandable… the blog won’t contain any overly sensitive/secret data just private things I would prefer to have a smaller group of folks to know and use. ??

“Would htaccess be my solution here?”

Yes, it would. The basic premise of using htaccess/htpasswd is that you can password-protect you entire site, if you wanted to. Your “.htaccess” file would contain something like this:


AuthName "PRIVATE AREA"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /path/to/your/htpasswd-file
Require valid-user


Your “.htpasswd” file would be then created and placed in the directory specified above. For the details on how to create it, see this article.

You may also want to restrict access from one IP address only by putting something like this in your “.htaccess” file:


<Limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
</Limit>


Thanks for the suggestion. I will try it out. Anyone have any ideas as far as preventing search engines from listing my blog? Or should I post a new topic?

if you’re taking pizdin’s approach, the search engines won’t be able to index your blog.

That makes sense… lets say I decide to not use htaccess and instead prefer to NOT have my blog included in search engines. Any idea(s) how to go about this? ??

That gets a lot dicier. You’ll certainly want to set up a robots.txt file, but not every spider/crawler will “respect” it.

You could, I suppose, password protect every Post/Page you make in the blog. Would get a bit tedious, but would work.

There are some “subscriber” type plugins that might be interesting to you. Only authorized users can login and see content.

Thanks for the tips! Appreciate the help.

Hmm… Keep it on your own computer, never show it to anybody. Better: on paper and in a locked drawer ??
Seriously, there is no such thing as “private” once it is published on the internet.

I laugh at these kinds of replies, some people think just because it’s the internet or web that it means everything is public domain and no such thing is private what a load of crapola,

that’s like saying just because every home has a door and window its free public domain for anyone to enter, it’s not and there’s no real difference in the privacy you would take on the web then it is in your own home,

there is such thing as privacy on the internet don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, ??
I think people on the web should take their privacy more seriously, you wouldn’t enter into every house on your block just because its on your block so, no different on the internet,

it would be nice to see the internet have tools to shut all the windows and doors on the internet and allow people to customize their internet experience, i’m shocked that there aren’t better tools for doing this, like blocking google ads on a site and other forms of advertisement, people hate to see these things he he

I think these kinds of tools willl be existing sooner then we think, future businesses will have to earn the right for us to see their products

Thought I would post a quick update. A new plugin has been released named WordPress Password and can be found here: https://broome.us/archives/2007/01/31/the-wordpress-password-plugin/

I will defintely be testing it out! It creates a splash logon page rather than using htaccess.

That password login works perfectly from what I can see. Whether it’s the highest form of security, I doubt it, but it gets the job done.

May I suggest that taking a “one password for everyone” approach will cause you headaches very quickly. As soon as you want to restrict access for an already granted person, you have to tell everyone else that the password has changed. The best plug-ins are those that allow each user to have his own password, and you as the administrator can simply disable individual login accounts. Much nicer!