Are you the master of your Domain?

Written by Heather

Are you the Master of your Domain?

You are in control of what you write about on your blog, right? Nobody tells you what to post about. Nobody tells you how to design your sidebars or makes demands on you to do this or that. Right?

But how do you control who reads your blog? If you blog, I'm sure you are aware that you're putting your thoughts out there in a public space. It’s like walking down the street in your undies. Anyone can see everything. Your boss could see. Your mom could see. And some unsavory people could see you too.

These past few days I’ve noticed some traffic hitting my blog via odd search engines. The search words / urls were for a porn site.

See, I post a lot about a form of short story writing called “flash fiction.” Well, think about another meaning to the word flash and you can imagine the kinds of search terms that are landing at my blog. Most of the time I can see the person leaves right away without reading anything. But this one visitor didn’t.

He stuck around. Read some pages. Came back the next day and read the tribute to my daughter for her 2nd birthday where I reminisce about nursing her. He even read my about page.

*shudder*

I wanted to get rid of this guy. And every guy like him.

So, what did I do? I posted in the MomDot forums for help. Trisha told me about a Wordpress plug-in that allows the user to ban a visitor based on IP address. It’s called WP-ban. If you’re a Wordpress user go check it out *. I found it really easy to use and it installed through my 2.8 dashboard no problem.

I went through my stat counter and banned every IP address that came in through from suspect means. I even put up a message so if they try to visit me again, they get a virtual smack upside the head.

Now, I’m feeling just a bit safer about my blogging underwear. I can still post what I want and know I can kick out the slime buckets as I see fit. I’m the master of my domain!

If anyone knows of a solution for blogger users please let us all know in comments :)

*always back up your files before installing a new plug-in!

Written by :

Heather of Maternal Spark

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Comments (1)

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Awesome post! Thanks for the info. I'm in the process of transfering to my own domain and WordPress. I'll be sure to install that plug-in.

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