I’ve never been a fan of using third-party hosting for anything that’s at all intimate to my life. Starting with some poor editorial decisions at LiveJournal ages ago (not decisions against me personally, but things that offended my principles in any case), I’ve largely eschewed any type of community site for hosting my writings, pics, etc. It’s not a matter of privacy concerns per-se. I don’t mind having my content posted to those sites or visible on the Internet, but I’m not a fan of relying on them to store the only copy of things that have emotional or other significance in my life.
Once upon a time, I used LiveJournal for blogging, Flicker (or sometimes LJ) for photo hosting, and pretty much trusted that they’d never have a server failure, censorship nazi hack attack etc. Since making the decision to not rely on LiveJournal over a decade ago, I’ve hosted my own blogging software on my co-located server (once WordPress on a box at my then-employer, these days Moveable Type on a Mini hosted at http://www.MacMiniColo.net). I still post photos I want to share to Flickr (mostly to use their “free” bandwidth instead of my own), but I maintain everything on my own server in a Gallery instance, just in case.
When I recently started actually *using* FetLife for writing about my life (account holder since August 2008, actually posting for four months…), I kind of back pedaled on my no-third-party-hosting standards and have left a few posts here that I would be rather disappointed to see evaporate into the ether some day. Now to be clear, I have no complaints about FL’s editorial policy, I have no particular information that leads me to think their platform is insecure, unstable, etc. (though those 503/nginx errors have been getting annoying lately…). Still, I prefer to host things on hardware I can backup, have full editorial control over, and ultimately can delete and completely remove from the Internet should I ever need to make that decision.
My vanilla friends & family read my “normal” blog (if you know my real last name, feel free to hit http://www.the<lastname>s.org/blog/ to see. It’s mostly geeky stuff, so be warned…), so posting kinky things there isn’t the best of options. Security options in MT could provide some kind of control, but I wouldn’t expect all my FL friends to create accounts and login there. So I figured it made the most sense to grab yet another domain name, setup another MT instance, and just post links on FL. I used to do similar on LJ to auto-post a link to LJ when I posted to WordPress. I don’t think it’s easy to setup an auto-post link to FL, so I’ll just have to remember to do it manually. On the upside, my MT instance provides ATOM feeds, so if you really care about my life, feel free to follow the feed in case I forget to post links.
http://www.pendorbound.com/
For now, I’ve copied the few writings I had from FL over to MT. I’m in the process of writing up detailed construction plans for the various furniture I’ve been posting about recently, so if you’re really a masochist, stop by in a few days for a pile of trig and algebra for figuring out Saint Andrews Cross angles…
For now, I’m probably going to continue to only post pics I want to share on FL as having the FL login check in front of them gives me just a tiny bit of a sense of (false) security that I’ll lean on for now.