Wordpressure

I'll let you in on a secret: I'm planning my escape.

You see, I've loved my time over here on Blogger, but you know how it is. All the cool kids are blogging on Wordpress and I'm feeling all left out!

Actually it's not that at all.

The problem with this blog is that it is neither fish nor fowl. It is too public to be able to write everything I would like, yet most of the content is too personal and everyday to be of interest to most readers.

This blog was always intended to journal my time with my wife and son (and latterly my daughter), so it was never going to be as consistently interesting to your average Joe Public as those blogs written for writing's sake. If I were only to blog when I thought I had "a good idea for a post", then I would be neglecting my main job of capturing as much as possible for posterity.

And to be honest, I have fallen into that trap, just a little. There are so many tiny little moments I would like to capture but don't, either due to lack of time or the fact that it doesn't seem worth a post in its own right, so I save it for later... then forget it.

But there's a much bigger problem. My son is going to school this year. And I decided some time ago that starting primary school would be the point when I would start to limit what I published about him. He is no longer a baby. He is increasingly a little person with his own boundaries. I have to start to learn to respect his privacy.

I mean, what could be more embarrassing than your Dad cooing about you online when you're trying to be a cool ten year old. OK, I'm getting ahead of myself, but it's better to start early with this, given that Google chaching means going offline won't save him from my scribblings.

So I figured that moving to Wordpress would be my best chance of setting the privacy level such that I could churn out lots of private posts and less frequently write something public (and hopefully interesting!).

BUT...

...Wordpress is not half as easy and flexible as I had thought. I badly need a Wordpress plug-in that will allow me to make posts public only to selected groups of readers designated as Family, Friends, Members, Subscribers, etc.

My new home is running Wordpress 2.9.1 but none of the plugins I've found are guaranteed to run with that version and I'm feeling a bit too new to Wordpress to start blindly experimenting. But there's no point moving til I sort this out as I'd rather wreck an empty blog than a full one.

Bugger.

Anyway, I WILL be moving soon - I've paid for it so I'll darn well use it! - and when I do, rest assured that the few but valued regular readers and commentors will get an invite to be the founder "members" at the new blog.

In the meantime, if you've any advice on Wordpress backups or social privacy plugins, please speak after the beep.