How to host a private blog
I wanted to write a private blog, primarily chronicling my journey and thoughts as a parent, as well as serving as a diary for the growth and development of my kids.
This would be a blog that was very personal to me, where my intended viewership is mostly myself (or rather, my future self). But I also wanted to be able to share it with close friends and family.
Why not make it public?
A normal, publicly accessible website would serve my needs just fine. But I had two competing requirements that were completely at odds with each other:
- I wanted to use the real names of my kids and my partner, as well as upload photos and videos that were completely uncensored.
- I didn’t want all of this to be visible to the World Wide Dangerous Web.
An uncensored blog
Many people write about their kids and family by using aliases, fake names, and censored photos.
If the intention is to write a blog that will be read by hundreds or thousands of people that you don’t know, then that may be the only option you have available to you. That’s a completely valid use case, and I appreciate some of the blogs from other parents that I’ve been able to glean knowledge from.
However, as a personal blog, the idea just didn’t sit right with me. It’s a bit hard to describe, but I didn’t want to feel like I was doing something shameful or dangerous. An analogy would be if I constantly used fake names when talking to my partner about our children, for fear of the neighbours hearing.
It’s a kind of pressure that I didn’t want to deal with while writing.
The dangers of the internet
Why do we need to protect the names and photos of our kids anyway?
I’ve heard a lot of reasons, ranging from the generic “but privacy” to the nauseating possibility of someone using AI deepfakes to create pornographic material from photos.
However, I found the following argument somewhat more convincing: consent.
My kids are unable to consent to having their personal details published to the wide web. And once things are on the internet, you can never take it back.
Options that I discarded
I considered and discarded the following options:
- a managed service like Blogger with privacy controls
- I want to host and control the tech stack myself…just because
- still requires uploading my personal data to a 3rd party
- finnicky to make people create user accounts and log in
- hosting something that allows logging in
- much more complex tech stack
- annoying to use
- throwing basic auth on every page with a shared password
- very annoying to use
- can’t revoke access to a single user
IP whitelisting
I ended up on the idea of simply whitelisting IP addresses that could access the personal blog. I would self-host the blog on my home server, and configure the IP whitelist on my nginx reverse proxy. This has numerous disadvantages:
- uptime of my home server is almost certainly worse than Blogger (but who cares)
- updating the whitelist is a bit annoying (but really not that bad)
- people with dynamic IPV4 addresses (read: everyone) could change IPs
- people on CGNAT would mean that their entire cohort sharing the same public IP could technically access my blog (but who cares - the scrapers certainly can’t)
- I can’t just share the blog out with a single link - I have to actually get their IP address
But ultimately, none of these were deal-breakers to me for my particular use case.