locked

For anyone who’s a regular reader (or even if you’re visiting for the second time), you may have noticed that certain controversial posts are gone.

They’re actually not completely gone, just locked away and hidden for now. More specifically, any post filed under the “personal” category of “journal” is locked – posts pertaining to my personal life.

If you’re not a regular reader, you may not know that this website started as a Livejournal way back in 2001. I started using it as an outlet when there were complications with my family at the time. Hell, almost no one knows that one of the very first posts was, in fact, written in a text editor as a statement to the judge and lawyers presiding over my parents’ divorce. From there, I found that writing that statement was just as helpful to me as it was to the judge, and I continued writing. Livejournal was a quick and easy way to start doing that, and back then, it wasn’t quite the emo playground that it is today. From there, I got my own hosting, and then it went through a variety of iterations, from a homebrew php/mysql system when I was first learning web programming, to movable type when I got lazy, to wordpress when I got even lazier.

Although the vast majority of posts that came after the family issues resolved have been fairly normal, due to last school year’s Debacle That Shall Not Be Named, there have been a number of posts that have a great deal of negative connotation, both for myself and for other people. Now, while I hardly claim to be popular to any degree, this web site does get exposure to a certain number of search engines. And a lot of searches have been turning up some of these negative posts more often than I like.

(Yes, I can see people’s referrals to this site. A great many of you are coming to a post about comcast sucking when you’re searching for information about comcast and mac addresses, and I have to wonder how many of you know that that post is from 2002 and probably not correct anymore.)

So, I came to question whether this exposure of these recent posts was a good thing. It was drawing attention away from the other pages on my site which I believe to be the true focus: pages about my old writing from a number of years back, pages about programming, about music, etc. In reality, I would much rather those pages to be the primary content of the site and the journal to be secondary. Then again, people see dated entries and think, “Ooh! Blog!” in either a positive or a negative light. (I personally hate the term blog)

Inevitably there are going to be other people looking at this site in the future. People who know me, and people who don’t. People who know me already probably know about what happened before. People who don’t would see those posts and would come to some preconceived notion of what I’m like without knowing anything (whether it be new friends, the freaking GW housing department, or – my biggest fear – job interviewers). A great many people have more issues than Newsweek. It’s just that I write about them, and most people don’t, emo teens notwithstanding. I don’t consider myself emo at all, but how I differentiate emo is a discussion for another time.

However, I had reservations about locking posts. Though I don’t talk a lot in person, people who have talked to me enough will know that I can be brutally honest about myself, and that I don’t hide anything about myself. I mean, I don’t go yelling about my problems from the rooftops, or telling people in daily conversation, but if it comes up, I don’t have a problem talking about it. I don’t believe that I have anything to hide. Memories of events that have happened before make up a person’s personality, and sometimes knowing those things yields a better understanding of the person.

I also don’t like the idea of essentially “deleting” posts. In real life, when you say something, you can’t just take it back and expect it to be wiped from everyone’s memory. So when you make posts with certain content “disappear” and pretend they never happened, it strikes me as a little dishonest.

However, I did weigh the sides, and in the end, chose to hide the posts. Again, they’re not permanently deleted, just hidden and locked. You’d need a privileged account on the site to read them, and no, just registering will not give you access. I have to specifically grant you access, so unless I have a specific reason to grant you access, you’re not seeing them.

No, I’m not stupid; I know it’s still cached in various places and anyone who really wants to find them can still find them. Again, you can’t erase history. That’s not my intent, never was. It’s for keeping attention away from specific controversial events on the main website and towards the rest of the site content, where it should be.

I forgot about this website for the majority of the summer. But I’m moving back to the dorm tomorrow (Saturday) so I have a number of things to write about before then, which I may or may not get to. If I do, they’ll be in separate posts anyway, split up by their topic. Because no one likes a huge post tagged with 15 categories and that many different topics to sift through to get to the specific content they’re looking for.