Blogging Questions: Anonymity, and commenting on own articles

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am interested in having my own personal blog

I would like the blog to be as anonymous as possible and have my own domain name.

Question 1: Is getting my own domain name and a hosted server, which I will have to of course pay for, less anonymous than just getting a free blog? Is it less likely to be censored?

I also want the ability to be the only one to comment on my articles. This may sound silly but it’s part of the writing, where the main blog post argues one side of an issue, and commenter #1 responds below, and the author maybe responds below that, blah blah. I wouldn’t want or need actual people commenting on it.

Question(s) 2: Can/should this be done in a regular blog’s comments though some kind of special comment system? Or should I just forget about it as too much trouble and just be done by HTML code in the main posting, making it only appear that they are comments?

2

Who do you think is going to censor your blog in either format? Unless you plan on posting kiddie porn, no one will care what you do.

3
  1. Depends on local laws. For example in my country, Greece, domain names under the .gr TLD are anonymous, ie if you do a WHOIS query all you get is the registrar info, not your personal info.

Your identity can only be released with a court order so you have to really step the line for your identity to become known.

  1. This is a piece of cake in Wordpress. For example you can allow only registered users to post comments and let yourself be the only registered user. Thus, only you can post comments.
4

If you’re using Blogger and post any copyrighted material without permission Google will, upon receiving a legitimate complaint, remove the page that the material appears on. Not the entire blog, but the entire page, ie, if you use a copyrighted photograph to illustrate the text that you write, everything, text and picture, will be removed. I have had several dozen pages removed that used my photographs in this fashion.

Wordpress will also.

5

That’s not censorship, that is enforcing legal rules. It can happen no matter where you post things on the net.

6

1 - Register your own domain through something like GoDaddy (and various others), who do not show your registration details to anyone who asks, unlike many registrars.

2 - Dog80’s suggestion for Wordpress is excellent, and many hosts will have a system to automatically setup Wordpress for you.

I have to ask, why the need for anonymity? The weak point here is that you will have to use a real credit card to actually pay for your domain and hosting, so law enforcement could (if they really want to) find out who you are.

If you just want casual anonymity, it is easy. If you are doing something bad, illegal or going to interest your local law enforcement… not so easy.

7

GoDaddy most certainly exposes all of your registration details by default. I think every registrar does (for common domain extensions).

However you can tack on “Private Registration” for $9.99/year at GoDaddy, and I’m sure something similar at other registrars.

But do not go to GoDaddy thinking you’ll be anonymous by default. That is not true.