Category: Blogs and Blogging

Reviews of blogs, posts about blogging culture, tips on using WordPress — it’s all here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Odes to Tools review round-up

Three weeks ago I blogged about a great review of Odes to Tools at Verse Wisconsin Online, but I’ve failed to make note of any of the other reviews and mentions the book has received over the past nine months. I started counting them up today, with the help of Google, and rediscovered a couple I’d completely forgotten about, so I think it’s high time I attempt a round-up.

  • My friend Todd Davis, author most recently of The Least of These, supplied a blurb after publication — which makes it almost like a review, right? — to help us promote the book. Read it here.
  • The first true review, on February 6, was from Dale Favier at mole. Dale is one of my oldest friends in the blogosphere, so this meant a lot. And I loved what he had to say: “How can you get lost, in a thirty page book? But I did. All these poems have edges, teeth. It’s a brilliant collection.” Read the rest.
  • The second review, in March, was from John Miedema, author of Slow Reading. I am all about reaching non-poets, so I was tickled to be reviewed by someone who loves reading and tools in equal measure, on a blog with a readership of librarians and geeks. John’s was a very bloggy review, meaning that he related it to his own experience, and he drew a design lesson about single-purpose versus multi-purpose tools that helped me see the book in a new light. Here’s his review.
  • A couple days later, poet and novelist James Brush published an equally bloggy and generous response at Coyote Mercury. The book led him to “imagine a world in which we didn’t throw things out the moment they broke.” Here’s what he wrote.
  • Also in March, the obviously very discriminating Daily s-Press, a blog about small press publications, took note.
  • In June, Verse Daily published a poem from the collection, “Ode to a Wire Brush.” I don’t know anyone there, so that definitely comes under the “kindness of strangers” heading. As a bonus, I got a chuckle out of their typo in the original title (subsequently corrected): “Odd to a Wire Brush.”
  • In July, poet and blogger Sherry Chandler compared me favorably with Emerson, and called my work “quiet and grounded.” It took days for my head to return to normal size. Here’s her review.
  • As mentioned previously, I didn’t know the reviewer at Verse Wisconsin Online from Adam’s off ox, and was impressed by the perceptiveness of his criticisms. I was also pleased with the venue. Judging by how many Wisconsin poets have made the cut at qarrtsiluni over the past five years, it’s a great place for poetry.
  • Most recently, my friend Rachel Barenblat, guest-blogging this week at The Best American Poetry, devoted a post to a review of the Odes. “What makes these poems work,” Rachel writes, “is their juxtaposition of mundane objects with breathtaking leaps of imagery.” Well, gosh. “Breathtaking” seems a little over-the-top, but who am I to argue with a soon-to-be-ordained rabbi?

Thanks to everyone who’s reviewed or linked to the book so far, and if I’ve left anyone off the list, please let me know. This is a really gratifying number of reviews and mentions, especially for a poetry chapbook. Hundreds of equally deserving chapbooks are published each year to far less notice. But probably their authors don’t blog, or if they do, aren’t active participants in blogging communities.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Postal Poetry back online, and a facelift for Moving Poems

Ezra Pound famously advised poets to “make it new.” Poetry websites, too, can benefit from regular revamping. For the past several days, I’ve been playing around working to re-create a couple of websites. I found out last week from Marja-Leena Rathje that a site I helped publish two years ago, Postal Poetry, was no longer online, so I set to work rebuilding it from the Google Reader feed. There were only 69 posts and one page to worry about, so that part of it was actually less time-consuming than figuring out the optimal design for a static, image-heavy site and finding a free WordPress theme to provide it. Our former theme-choice worked pretty well, but it was designed for an earlier version of the WordPress software, and I didn’t think it would be worth the trouble to update it.

At first I was seduced by a beautiful design, but it didn’t really do what I wanted as far as the index and category pages were concerned, and it was practically impossible to tweak because it was one of those theme framework child themes where one isn’t supposed to make alterations except to the stylesheet and the functions.php file, and every time I tried to edit the latter, I got the infamous WordPress white screen of death and had to use FTP to restore the site. It turns out that functions files are hyper-sensitive to the wrong kind of spacing, or something. I think theme frameworks are designed solely for the convenience of professional web developers with lots of clients who don’t want to ever touch a line of code. They’re a lousy fit for hobbyists like me, who actually enjoy doing our own maintenance as long as it doesn’t involve the equivalent of dropping in a new engine.

So anyway, I ended up using a theme designed for aggregator sites. Although it’s hardly an unsophisticated theme, and works great out of the box, its designers also anticipate that users will hack the files to fit their needs. That’s what I like to see! I found a serviceable header logo in my files that Dana had designed for the original site, but that we never used, I don’t think.

It might seem crazy to spend so much time re-creating a short-lived site whose original domain name had been scavenged by someone else, but I just hate to see discontinued periodicals vanish without a trace. I got all kinds of creative inspiration from the pieces we published there — I did my Postcards from a Conquistador series that winter — and some of the best cards on the site still take my breath away.

In the process of contacting contributors to Postal Poetry to let them know that their work was back online, I was surprised to hear that one of them, Emma Passmore, had just taken the Public Jury Prize for Best Film at the 2010 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. ZEBRA is like the Academy Awards for poetry films, except that it’s truly international, with more than 900 entries this year. I can’t link to a full version of Emma’s film, Breathe, because apparently some of the festivals where it’s been shown embargo web publication for up to a year. (Who knew that film festivals were even more jealous about content than literary magazines?) She did upload the French version, so I suppose I can share that at Moving Poems, at least. Since I’ve been making a lot of low-tech one-minute videopoems lately, it’s great to see a professional director and poet win top honors for a one-minute film!

Speaking about Moving Poems, that’s been the other focus of my website-building mania of the past few days. I wanted something that made a little better use of screen real estate, while remaining fairly minimalist and easy to use. A new theme called Blogum caught my eye, and again, it proved easy to mess around with. I swapped in the fonts from the previous theme, in part to provide some stylistic continuity and in part because I preferred them to Helvetica and Arial. (The front-page tag cloud just looked terrible in Helvetica, for some reason. Verdana isn’t nearly as bad for things like that.) After a lot of puttering, I think I’ve got it pretty much the way I want it, with one exception: it could use a simpler logo in the upper left corner. Any artists or designers want to give it a shot? I can’t afford to pay, but you’d get a permanent link and credit in the footer.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Morning Porch: the movie


Direct link to video on Vimeo.

More and more publishers are producing video trailers for new books. Perhaps it’s time to start making them for websites, too. This action-packed trailer, though, is intended less to promote The Morning Porch than simply to introduce it to new readers — something to embed on the About page.

I shot the video yesterday for my one-minute movies project, and I suppose I’ll still class it as such even though it goes five seconds over with the addition of the Paul Eluard quote (which I stole from a friend’s pseudonymous Facebook profile a while back). This one is definitely more documentary than videopoem. I could probably make it more exciting with a few, brief inserts of other images: you know, close-ups of things glimpsed from the porch. But that might clash with the message of the text, I don’t know. Here’s what I wrote for it:

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a prisoner, condemned to the same round every day, compelled to do things I had little appetite for, surrounded by others in the same situation, all of us desperate with loneliness and the desire to be somewhere, anywhere else. What would I do? I’m a writer, so I suppose I would write. It would be an almost enviable situation: all that free time. I would take note of everything I saw, immerse myself in the moment no matter how bleak, because daydreaming would only lead to despair. I would write small, spare things 140 characters in length that some would call poems, but that I would see as clauses of one long sentence. I’d be in for life.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetic trees

black birches in Plummer's Hollow
black birches in Plummer's Hollow

This month’s Festival of the Trees blog carnival at Kind of Curious features an unusually large haul of poetry, including poems by Daniela Elza, Nic S., Eric Burke, Dorothee Lang, Walt Franklin and Rob Kloss. I also enjoyed some of the more informational posts on topics ranging from nurse trees to the destruction caused by the recent tornadoes in New York City to the practical and legal implications of tree-hugging in the U.K. I’m not going to link to any of these individually, because John did all the work pulling the link-fest together — he deserves all the traffic. So go visit.

Don’t forget to bookmark or subscribe to the coordinating blog of the Festival of the Trees, and whenever you happen to blog about trees or get a tree-related item published on the web, try to remember to send us the link. Also, we still need a volunteer to host the festival on December 1, so let me know if you’re interested.

One final tree-related note: my mother’s nature column for October is all about last year’s devastating October snowstorm. I think I posted some of my photos here at the time, but Mom goes into much more detail than I did, so go for the photos if you want, but stay for the writing. That storm was about as much excitement as we ever get around here.

I went out in mid-morning while it was snowing heavily again. The forest was a palette of white, gold, and green. Black birch and witch hazel trees were bent over and a few black gum trees had broken in the woods both inside and outside the deer exclosure.

Large branches littered the Far Field Road along with occasional whole trees — red maple, sugar maple, hickory, chestnut oak, and a split black cherry. Once again snow piled up on the leaves and branches of standing trees, and after I had walked over to the Sapsucker Ridge Trail and across the black-locust-bowed Far Field, I heard the smash of a tree or large branch on the Far Field Road. Nervous about my safety, I tried to hasten along the ridgetop trail…

Snow on autumn leaves is a beautiful sight. But an excess of beauty can be a terrible thing.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Woodrat Podcast 19: Lorianne DiSabato

Lorianne DiSabato
left: in San Diego; right: in Dharma teacher robes (photos by Jim Gargani)

Lorianne DiSabato is a writer, photographer, naturalist, college instructor, and Zen teacher who’s been blogging at Hoarded Ordinaries for nearly seven years. We’ve been friends for almost that long, and first met in person in March 2005, but I realized there were still some questions I’d never asked her. I got her talking about how she got into nature, how or whether she would categorize Hoarded Ordinaries, journaling versus blogging, getting married at the zoo, nature writing as a pilgrimage, the myth of the literary hermit, blogging and Buddhism, the danger of Zen books, and more.

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Literary journals in the age of the internet

Newsweek magazine recently celebrated Arianna Huffington as the savior of online journalism, so I thought a Huffington Post piece on “17 Literary Journals that Might Survive the Internet” might offer some unique insights into how magazines like qarrtsiluni could better leverage the ever-evolving technologies of web distribution. No such luck.

In his set-up, Anis Shivani asks how literary magazines are surviving and thriving amidst the rise of the Internet, but all the examples are of one particular kind of literary magazine: those existing primarily or entirely in print. It’s a classic bait-and-switch. And there’s a pretty amusing dissonance between the medium and the message here: a procession of brief, punchy quotes from lit mag editors decrying the shallowness of our culture, each accompanied by a poll to let readers vote on whether their particular magazine is dead or thriving, on a scale of 1 to 10. Still, unlike Shivani’s mean-spirited compendium of over-rated writers from last week, this new piece of HuffPo literary link-bait is invaluable for its insights into the thinking of the American literary print-magazine establishment. I think the editor of Pleiades, Wayne Miller, best encapsulates the scarcity-thinking that seems to afflict most of these editors:

As more people put out literary publications — and the Internet makes this even easier, since online magazines don’t need to secure distribution — it becomes increasingly difficult to capture the attention of an audience that’s naturally limited in size. I don’t think the Internet shrinks or grows that audience significantly, it just spreads it even thinner.

I strongly disagree that the audience for quality poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction is fixed; that hasn’t been my experience at all. This is just anecdotal evidence, of course, but I’ve been told more times than I can count that publications like qarrtsiluni and even Via Negativa have turned people on to poetry for the first time since they were in college. My hunch is that online literary magazines and blogs and their various hybrids are reaching a vast number of people who never read print literary magazines, whether through poverty (that’s been my excuse) or sheer ignorance of their existence. Not everyone lives near a large bookstore or university library, but anyone with a good dial-up connection can read literature for free online — and then have a conversation with other readers, and even with the author. The internet is not only bringing serious writing into people’s homes, it’s making it more down-home at the same time. And I believe it’s selling books. (It’s selling mine, at any rate.)

Curious, I click through to the Pleiades website, and experience the usual bafflement I feel with such magazines: like, where is it? I click on “Current Issue,” and there’s nothing but a photo of the cover and a list of the contents, no clickable links to any sample content, no links to authors’ websites, not even a goddamn link to order the issue online! What is the point of the webpage, then? My only option, apparently, is to subscribe to the journal. There’s a “Back Issues” page, but it too provides no clue about how to obtain the magazines displayed there. I feel like I’m peering into the window display of a closed bookstore, or perhaps a museum diorama.

Not all the literary magazines on show at the HuffPo are quite this clueless, though. I really hope the Pleiades editors read the comments from The Southern Review editor Jeann Leiby:

[O]ver the last two years, our subscription base has grown — not decreased. In large part, this is because of the internet and social networking websites. With the internet, it is easier — and less expensive — to advertise, to broaden our audience, and to entice people to The Southern Review’s printed pages. I’m not saying that I think online literary journals don’t have a place or are in any way lesser than print journals — only that the two things need not be mutually exclusive. I think there is audience enough for all of us.

Yes. Thank you!

Some of the points these editors make about the distracted nature of online reading strike me as quite valid, too, though there are various ways to get around that. They all seem pretty poorly informed about the variety of electronic, podcasting, and print-on-demand options available to them.

Take Richard Burgon of Boulevard magazine: “Literary journals (and books) offer the subtle pleasures of touch, portability and visibility — that strange delight their writers, and readers too, feel in seeing books physically exist in a bookstore or other public place — that the internet can’t yet duplicate” — as if “the internet” presented a monolithic reading experience, and were the only alternative to traditional print publication. What about the Kindle, for example, which Jeff Bezos insists will remain a reading-only device, one free of distractions from email and the web? I gather from those who own one that the reading experience is really quite comparable to a paperback book, with very little eye-strain. John Miedema — he of Slow Reading fame, as strong a critic of online reading habits as anyone you’ll find — has given it pretty good reviews:

For the most part, I felt like I was reading a book, only a bit slower. I suspect my base reading skills are being rewired just slightly, like the experience of seeing through a new pair of glasses. Sometimes I scan pages when I read, but on the Kindle I was forced to click ahead one page at a time, and could not easily jump back and forth over multiple pages. I would hate to cram a textbook this way. […] After reading on the Kindle, I also read a print book and again found it a richer reading experience, but only marginally. In the future, I will make a point of distinguishing ebooks from ereaders. The Kindle and its competitors are not interesting because they mix digital technology with book content, i.e., ebooks; the computer did that. Ereaders are compelling because they merge digital technology with an acceptable physical interface for long-form reading.

The Huffington Post may or may not have the keys to the future of online journalism (and I know quite a few science bloggers who would choke at the suggestion), but if you’re looking for insights into the future of literary publishing, you’re better off reading real book bloggers like John.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Rethinking the blog: new design, a digression on SEO, and the return of the Woodrat Podcast

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or your email inbox, you might want to click through and check out the new blog redesign. Or not — it’s really very similar to my last redesign, except that now I am actually using the theme (Kirby, by Ian Stewart) that last time was merely my inspiration. It’s also the theme that inspired the new default theme that ships with self-hosted WordPress, TwentyTen, so it’s a look you’ll probably be seeing a lot more of in the months and years to come.

Why the change? I love messing around with CSS and tweaking PHP templates, but after a while, if you’re neither a trained designer nor a skilled programmer, a blog theme kind of wears out. I was getting increasingly frustrated with my own inability to find the proper fonts, colors and proportions, and a couple of technical glitches in the way that certain plugins interacted with my old theme defeated all my attempts to troubleshoot. It was ultimately less work to import all my significant tweaks into a new, more technically sophisticated theme than to keep hacking the old. And in the process of making a single sidebar into a double one, somehow I managed to finesse the spacing so that I have both a wider main column and more white space on the sides (from 960 pixels wide it’s back down to 940), without — I hope — making things feel too crowded.

I heeded the advice from a couple people after the last redesign and did away with the colored box around the sidebar. This theme also includes the option of putting sidebar material in a four-column footer (see Morning Porch for an example). I might still use that space here; I don’t know. I did reduce the number of posts displayed on the main page to just five so the site would load more quickly, but I still tend to think that if you want people to see anything in the footer, you have to have either really short posts (as at Morning Porch) or else post just the titles and short excerpts with “read more” links.

(On a technical note, for the benefit of other self-hosted WordPress bloggers: it proved quite easy to add the new custom menus feature introduced with WordPress 3.0. I followed this tutorial.)

One of the niftiest features of the old blog was the magic javascripty drop-down categories menu activated by a “browse” link in the navigation bar. I don’t have so many categories that I can’t simply list them in the sidebar, as I’ve done, and I believe with the categories showing now, the search engines should index the site more effectively. Which brings me to…

A brief digression on SEO

I am not after more traffic for Via Negativa, necessarily, I just want the right readers to be able to find it. To me, that’s what search-engine optimization (SEO) is really all about: making your content maximally available to its optimal audience, however large or small, general or specialized it might be. Popularity in and of itself should never be a goal for noncommercial bloggers: it leads to higher hosting costs, more spam comments, more malicious hacker attacks, and eventually, perhaps even a loss of the very readers you want to attract if your blog becomes a popular commenting spot for bullies with an axe to grind. Like many people, I was saddened today to read that Ron Silliman, the most popular poetry blogger in English, has felt compelled to shut down comments altogether, though I totally empathize with his position. It made me realize: hey, it’s good to be small.

It’s not just size, though. Via Negativa is a very different kind of poetry blog from Silliman’s, and I don’t think those of us who regularly post drafts of our own work, and who are more interested in appreciation than critical assertions when talking about other people’s poetry, are in any danger of attracting large numbers of commenters who, as Silliman put it, see poetry as a contact sport. Of course, rude and offensive comments are hardly restricted to literary criticism blogs these days; they’re the bane of online newspapers and YouTube videos as well. But as long as your site doesn’t get too popular, moderating comments isn’t too much of a chore. In seven years of blogging, I don’t think I’ve gotten more than a dozen truly hateful comments.

So with all this in mind, I think the question of whether or how much to tailor one’s content to fit likely searches becomes a lot easier to answer. Rather than obsessing over SEO, it makes more sense to expend energy finding, linking to, and commenting on great blogs, because that’s where your best and most thoughtful readers are going to come from — not to mention the inspiration for your next post. Literary, nature, and other niche bloggers need to work on building cultures of generosity rather than building our personal brands, as so many blogging gurus urge us to do. Then again, Silliman has always been very generous with links, and look where it got him.

The return of the Woodrat Podcast

I still have a podcast link-button at the top of the sidebar, and that’s because I do plan to resume podcasting next month. I’m not sure yet whether I will again be posting episodes once a week, or whether I’ll drop back to once every two weeks, but regardless, it will continue to be a highly edited show consisting mainly of interviews with writers, naturalists, artists, and other kindred spirits. The idea, as before, will be to try and elicit discussions of interest to the sort of people who read Via Negativa. I am less interested in records of achievement than in unique backgrounds and perspectives. I have a list of possible interviewees who I’ll begin contacting soon, but I’m also open to volunteers — email bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com. If you have suggestions of people I should contact, I’ll consider those, too, but I don’t have a whole lot of moxie, so I’ll tell you right now I probably won’t approach too many people with whom I haven’t already had some contact through blogging, Facebook, or qarrtsiluni.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Eight questions

Last month, I responded to a five-question interview meme. For readers unfamiliar with blogging customs, a blog meme is like a chain letter: if you don’t pass it on, you haven’t properly completed the meme. I was supposed to come up with five new questions of my own and tag five bloggers, but five seemed too few. How about eight questions instead?

  1. Is half a stone still a whole stone?
  2. Do grains of sand get tired of being recycled into mountains?
  3. If you crossed a bat with a mushroom, would you get an umbrella?
  4. Do the glasses one wears in a dream require a prescription?
  5. What songs do they sing in a school without windows?
  6. Do the daisies love us or not?
  7. Is there any reason to believe that we’ll have working mouthparts in the next life?
  8. What kind of cartilage connects us to the stars?

Now the challenge is to find eight bloggers who might actually enjoy answering such questions. Let’s see. How about:

Of course, being tagged in this fashion confers no obligation whatsoever, and anyone not on the list is also free to tackle the questions. Please leave a link to your answers in the comments.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Tree tales

achey breaky
The latest Festival of the Trees — the monthly blog carnival I help coordinate with a couple of online friends — is one of the most entertaining and literary editions to date. I loved the Kenneth Pobo poem that Yvonne included, and her story about her grandfather’s elderberry wine is not to be missed. Check it out.

Fungi are arguably as essential to the composition and functioning of a forest as trees are. My mom’s nature column for July describes some of the most charismatic and tasty mushrooms found in our woods, as part of a portrait of Bill Russell, “The Mushroom Man.”

You know, one thing that really annoys me about suburban people who move to the country (one of many things, I admit) is their tendency to cut down all the trees around their house for fear they might someday fall on the roof. Now, if you live in a fire-dependent ecosystem such as a Ponderosa pine forest, keeping trees and brush away from your house is exactly the right thing to do, but otherwise — um, why exactly did you want to live in the woods in the first place?

High winds are by nature unpredictable, and no life is without risk. But it turns out that being surrounded by trees can actually save you from far worse damage if you take a direct hit from a large tornado, as Debby Kaspari and her husband discovered.

Although we lost a lot of near-irreplaceables and irreplaceables […] we got a lot back, too. We took every recovery as a miraculous gift.

This miracle was brought to us by our beloved trees, which were destroyed utterly. As a parting gift, they fell inward onto the roof, holding down what was underneath. This included a floor-to-ceiling bookcase at the center of the house. When the house fell, the bookcase dropped face forward; books stayed in place as they fell, the solid wood back of the bookcase adding its layer of protection. Although the wall behind the bookcase crumbled, roof and shingles fell straight down on top like a lid, and heavy oak limbs latched it down tight.

Be sure to click through and read the whole thing (along with Debby’s other posts about the tornado). The photo of her hugging her banjo the day after the tornado is worth several thousand words at least.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

How to Delete a Blog

So you want to commit blogicide. Is this a spur-of-the-moment decision, prompted by a sudden attack of self-loathing, morbid shyness, angst or ennui? If so, you’re probably not going to do anything so left-brained as to search the web for instructions like these. On the off chance that you do, however, here’s my first piece of advice:

Back up the blog before deleting

I’m not talking about just saving your work to disk. You should be doing that anyway, unless blogging is some kind of bizarre exercise in egolessness and impermanence for you. What I mean by backing up your blog is saving it so that if at some point you should change your mind and want to reinstate it, or begin another blog and incorporate the archives from your old blog, you can do that. The procedure for doing so varies according to the platform you’re using. For example, with Blogger/Blogspot, click on Export blog in the Settings → Basic tab, and save the XML file onto your computer. This can be imported not only into a new Blogspot blog, but also into blogs on other platforms, such as Typepad and WordPress. WordPress will import not only posts and all associated metadata, but also comments from Blogger (but not from third-party commenting systems).

If you’re using WordPress, you can also export your blog to back it up, but, just as with Blogger, this will not save files. If you’re on WordPress.com, you can contact support and ask them to send you a zipped file of your images and other files you’ve uploaded; self-hosted WordPress.org bloggers can save files themselves via FTP (and can also take advantage of database backup plugins). Typepad users have to save files one by one, but evidently there are some third-party tools than can automate this — see “How do I backup my content?” on the Typepad Knowledge Base. Regardless of the blogging platform, backing up files is a pain in the ass to one degree or another, which brings me to another piece of advice:

Consider hosting images and other files on third-party sites

If you’re only planning to blog for a limited time, or especially if you anticipate moving your blog at some point, it’s a whole lot easier to upload photos to Flickr, Picasa, or some other photo-sharing site and link from there. Free and cheap file-storage services exist for other formats, too — hardly anyone hosts their own video, for example. If privacy is part of the motivation for terminating your blog, remember that photos on sites like Flickr can be marked private there, but still display in your posts if you ever revive your blog. I do advise against using image-sharing sites that don’t require any registration, however: many of the older images on this blog have disappeared because I foolishly stored them at Imageshack, and evidently they periodically clean out old files that no one has viewed for a while.

Going private as an alternative to blogicide

One alternative to deleting a blog is simply making it private. In Blogger, go to Settings → Permissions → Blog Readers and click “only readers I choose.” Blogs hosted at Typepad and WordPress.com can also be made private. (If you want to make just some of your blog posts private, WordPress offers the option of having password-protected posts on otherwise public blogs, which is a feature that seems to be drawing many writers of a more ambitious bent than me, who intend to eventually submit much of their content to publications that don’t consider previously published work.) Private blogs (or password-protected posts) will not be syndicated in feeds and will not be indexed by search engines.

Preventing your content from being perpetuated elsewhere

Again, I realize that most of the time people don’t start blogging with the intention of eventually wiping the slate clean, but if that is your long-term goal, you have to think seriously about whether you want to be indexed by search engines. Google in particular can cache material from dead websites for a very long time, and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine exists for the stated purpose of preserving copies of the Internet for all time. You may think you’ve deleted your blog, but chances are that at least half of all your content has been preserved at the Internet Archive. They’ll remove it if you write to them and ask, but you can also instruct their spiders not to crawl your site in the first place — and the same goes for Google and other search engines.

On WordPress.com, under Settings → Privacy, there’s an intermediate setting you can check: “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors.” In other blogging platforms where you have direct access to your theme/template files, you can insert code instructing bots not to index or cache your content. If you have access to the root of your domain, you can simply use a robots.txt file. If you want to exclude the Internet Archive from copying your blog for all eternity, but still be accessible to search engines up until the date of deletion, you can do that too.

Cutting the feeds

Feeds are generated automatically by all modern blogging and content management system software. In most if not all systems, you can choose to supply partial rather than full-content feeds consisting of the first several lines of each post (although those of us who subscribe to feeds find this intensely annoying), but making the RSS completely private is quite a bit trickier, from what I gather. You’re better off disabling the feed altogether: Settings → Site Feed → “None” in Blogger; I don’t think this option exists for WordPress.com blogs without making the blog itself completely private. For a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can either edit your theme’s functions.php file or use a plugin.

Once a feed reader or aggregator has syndicated your content, deleting your feed won’t destroy that content. Anyone who happens to have subscribed to your blog at any point will still be able to read your posts indefinitely (and I hesitate to point this out, because in some cases I have saved the contents of deleted blogs I was fond of in this manner). So before disabling your feed or deleting your blog, if you want to be thorough you can republish all your old posts with empty or minimal content, then wait a day or two for feed readers to update all the posts. As long as you don’t change the permalinks in any way, this should overwrite all the old content. Then you can proceed to total blogicide.

Don’t forget about incoming links and readers

When I moved this blog from Blogspot to a self-hosted WordPress installation back in 2006, I initially kept the old blog up with a redirect message. But after a year went by I got tired of having all that duplicate content up, and I deleted the blog. Bad move.

It turned out that Blogger had no problem recycling unused subdomains to new users, so neithernor.blogspot.com quickly turned into a splog, or spam blog, selling some kind of tawdry product — I can’t remember just what. Fortunately, this seems no longer to be the case: Blogger has joined WordPress.com, Typepad, and other reputable hosted blogging services in retiring subdomains after blogs are deleted. This does mean of course that you won’t be able to reuse the subdomain yourself, either — once deleted, it’s gone. So think carefully before you click that Delete button. Even if you back up everything and import into a new blog, you’ll have to start from zero as far as incoming links and readers are concerned.

For domains you register yourself, the problem still remains. Serious sploggers have automated systems to notify them the instant that a domain in use becomes available, and such domains are valuable to them because of the incoming links, which might translate into clicks on ads. So if you’re only planning to blog for a limited time, go with a hosted service where you’ll be mysitename.whatever.com. If you do find yourself in the position of deleting a site with a registered domain, you’ll have to decide whether it’s worth it to continue paying the annual registration fee and just put some sort of “this site is closed” message up, or whether you want to try and contact all the people who were kind enough to link to you and ask them to remove the link so their readers won’t end up on some crappy, possibly virus-ridden site.

One way or another, if people have linked to you, it’s a nice courtesy to let them know that the site has been deleted — nobody likes having dead links. And what about your readers? Surely they deserve a little advance notice of the blog’s impending demise, so they have a chance to catch up on reading if they’ve gotten behind. You can always disable comments if you don’t feel like fielding a bunch of distraught messages. It’s your blog and you can do what you want with it — if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t have written this post — but I do think we have some obligations to our readers and fellow bloggers. As with suicide, it’s grim to contemplate and no one who loves you is going to be happy with your decision, but there is a right way to do it.