Just so you all know, Gigi of the (now-dark) Mamalicious has pulled the plug on her blog after someone with a suspicious email address started prying into her real-world life. Details on her site, but I’ve heard she may not be the first blogger this individual has latched on to. If it’s the same person then he or she (“friendly name” is female, actual address sounds male) will have tried to embarrass her by, for instance, contacting her church, her employer, or someone else in her community and linked her real-life name to her URL. Yikes! Who could blame her for taking down all her posts?

I’ve got several reactions to this:
1) What’s going on?
First of all, I wasn’t able to get any useful hits Googling for her assailant either by alias or email handle except for what seems to have been a very short-lived Blogspot blog. If anyone else has more information about this person, or direct or indirect experience with anything similar, could you drop me an email? Unlike some people, who are really angry about this, I’m not planning retaliation or anything. It’s just that I’d like to know if this is an isolated incident or if it’s part of a developing trend.

2) Going down gracefully
One thing that’s always especially tough about taking your site down in a hurry, for what ever reason, is the risk of losing all your hard work, your friend’s comments, and everything else. Some blogging systems make it easy, maybe too easy, to just flush everything, and when you’re in a hurry, or discouraged, or hurt, it’s a natural reaction to just click “Are you sure?” But then it’s all gone.

Just as we should all familiarize ourselves with the nearest exit when we check in, or know how to change a tire before you get a flat on a rainy night, it’s a good idea to learn how to quickly backup your blog entries to disk. It’s a good idea to backup anyway of course — remember the multi-week Indecent Blogger meltdown last year? — but it’s especially handy to know how to do it when you’re stressed out and in a hurry to clear things out. So if you haven’t done so lately, take a minute to dig around in your blog console and find the backup feature. Then give yourself a couple of fire drills so it’ll come naturally if the day ever comes.

3) Witness Protection
Those of us who blog anonymously need to remember that nothing stays hidden on the internet forever. Our ISP can be compromised, account information can be hacked, and of course we can forget to close our browser window when our gossipy neighbor drops by asking for a copy of the blockwatch list. Thus the best protection is to remember than anonymity is a screen, not a fortress, and conduct ourselves accordingly. Two things that come to mind:

- Avoid naming names of people, towns, employers. – Use Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, or some other free mail service instead of your personal mail account.

If you have other suggestions (there are TONS) please leave them in comments and I’ll add them to this list and credit you for it.

4) Witness Relocation
When you decide to move your blog, for whatever reason, you’ve got all kinds of decisions to make. If you want to bring your old posts with you, note that most of the big blogging tools can read in your backup from other blogging tools. If you’re moving to avoid hassles you have a few decisions to make about that too. Google’s wheels grind exceedingly fine and pretty quickly to boot, as too many stalker-avoiders have discovered. It’s natural to want to continue using your old alias and IM or email addresses, but again thanks to Google it’s not a very good idea. A few more ideas for preserving your new identity come to mind:

• Be different: A determined stalker would find “Figtree’s Grown Up Sex” pretty quickly and (very unfortunately) so would any permutation of “libertine prude.” Make a complete break with that part of your past, however much it pains you to do so.
• Tell your friends, and tell them your situation: This is another good reason to grab a backup. You can go through your list of trusted commenters and let them know where you’re resurfacing. You should also tell them that you’d appreciate it if they didn’t announce your new location or refer to you by your old name in (also Google-able) new comments. Also, since most people would like to recover their former traffic, let them know if you’d like them to blogroll your new site but also let them know roughly when and how you’d like to be added. You’ll be far harder to track down again if links to your site seem to grow organically than if everyone suddenly replaces your old URL with your new one.
• Distort before you restore: This may be trickier both technically and tactically, but if you really want to republish your old posts I’ve got three recommendations. First, since most blog backups arrive as text files, it’s pretty easy to open it in a text editor and change names, dates, places, links, and identifying (read Google-able) phrases. Then you can either post individual entries by hand or upload them. (Do I have to say make a backup of the original first, just in case?) If you do choose to repost, consider dribbling them out over time rather than plopping them all down in a big swoop.
• Welcome aboard: Rebuild traffic the old fashioned way. You were probably interesting before, chances are you’ll still be interesting at your new location. One nice thing about reposting gradually instead of all in a chunk is you’ll give a whole new set of readers something to think and comment about and come back looking for more of. Also, don’t just go back to your same old places and start making the same old comments. While it’s fine to comment to old friends it’s important to remember your stalker is probably bright enough to look for you there until they grow bored and go bug someone else. If you do check in, make it look as though you’re making friends with them for the first time, and while you’re at it, search around a little and find some new places to make comments… and friends. (I’ve found commenting is one of the best ways both to draw new visitors to your own site and make great new friends.)

• One more thing: if you’ve been using Flickr or some other site to host images, audio, blogrolls, or other collateral remember to change that as well. No sense using the same old Flickr account to repost old photos in your new blog.

That’s a very short list and I’m sure you’ve got other and probably better recommendations from [a now-dark blogger who wishes to remain anonymous]:

• change your IM screennames. Check your old one for offline messages from time to time, but change it. A must. I’m actually considering changing mine recently. Don’t just add another ID, get a whole new account.
• DO not post from foreign computers. Don’t use school, work, or library resources. You’ll get busted. Even clearing the cache doesn’t stop someone who wants to know where that computers been.
• If you can, request a new IP Address from your provider. Some providers change it regularly, others do not.
• Don’t use an RSS Feed. This way you can access the IP addresses of whoever comes to your site.
• Get a stat counter that allows you to veiw total IP adresses. Some sites request payment for this. A good one is addfreestats.com.
• Take only the trusted few. They should be proven people or be able to prove themselves. I know that sounds insane, but you’re trying to avoid the crazies, and sometimes it’s those closest to you.

• Build your blogroll slowly again. Those from your old site who were supposed to find you, will. I promise. And it’ll be a happy reunion for you both.

[And here’s one from Rosie —fl]

• I’ve read where a writer will email a copy of each post to an off-line account, like Gmail, specifically set up for just that purpose. So all are preserved – known only to you.

[Thanks, Rosie. —fl]

• USE A HARD-TO-GUESS PASSWORD! Ok, I probably didn’t have to shout like that but it sounds like someone’s started logging into people’s Blogger accounts and defacing their blogs. If your blog is called something like “Hawt Lix” and your password is either “hawt” or “lix” or (the one security experts say is astoundingly common) “sex” then sooner or later someone’s going to figure it out. Better to use a mix of upper and lower-case letters with numbers.

• Two quick and dirty ways to make up easy to remember gibberish passwords: a) Pick a favorite sentence or song lyric and make an acronym out of it. E.g. “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art though, Romeo?” becomes “RRw4atR” or b) pick an address that only you are likely to remember. E.g. “1211NEColumbusWay” where you lived when you got your first puppy or “BraxtonHall42D” for the dorm room where you lost your virginity.

Again, if you post your ideas in comments I’ll add them to the list and give you credit.

So there you go. Something to think about while I miss Gigi and bitterly regret not being able to read her wonderful stories, insights, and randy poems or see her delicious pictures. Sigh.

As Red Green says, Remember I’m pulling for you, we’re all in this together. :-)