Just before the arrival of my 2nd daughter I launched a new Wordpress site so we’d be able to keep family and friends up to date with the latest pictures and goings on.  We’d previously tried this but after a couple weeks it would start to fizzle to one post a week, then one a month and so on to basically a dead site.

The first couple sites were ones I was building in Dreamweaver with static pages that all had to be updated by hand. Part of the reason in the past that we didn’t just use a blog site was because we wanted pictures and sensitive information to be password protected.  Family blogs are different in that respect. You aren’t looking to get huge viewership, you just want to be able to share private photos, videos and stories that you wouldn’t share with the entire world.

Long story short it was never easy enough to post, much less for my wife to be able to post, there were security issues and password communication problems with family, etc.  There were just too many obstacles to overcome to create a successful family blog…  until now.

Finally! This time we got it right.

Thanks to the help of this post on Simply Basic, I decided on Wordpress and a pile of plugins. Surprisingly it works nearly flawlessly, is easy to use, my wife can post with ease (and therefore posts more often), it’s secured, family can all have their own login, and much, much, more.

Here are some more details on setting up your own secure Family Blog.
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Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

• Jobs: MobileMe “not up to Apple’s standards”
  Apple CEO Steve Jobs conceded in an e-mail to Apple employees that the company had made numerous mistakes during the launch of its MobileMe Internet service, saying that the service “was simply not up to Apple’s standards”
• Google backs ISP-guaranteed minimum data rates
  If Comcast can’t use TCP reset packets to limit the number of BitTorrent connections a client can spawn, what legitimate techniques can ISPs use to deal with congestion ? Google’s Vint Cerf, today weighed in with his answer: transmission rate caps.
• Aurora: The Future of the Internet
  What will browsing the web be like a decade from now? Leading design and UI company Adaptive Path offers one possible answer in a new concept video series called Aurora, demonstrating what the future of the web might look like.
  

As I posted on Friday, the Wordpress Postalicious plugin broke on Friday when Delicious launched their redesign.  Thankfully, the plugin author, Pablo Gómez Basanta, quickly cranked out the changes and updated the plugin to v2.6 which fixes the issue.

I’m not a full time blogger or anything so I rely heavily on the Postalicious plugin to keep my blog active.  All I have to do is bookmark interesting sites/pages/articles using the Delicious Firefox plugin and the links are published automatically for me on whatever interval I choose.

Features

• Automatically create posts in your blog with your bookmarks
• Works with delicious, ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit and Yahoo Pipes.
• Complete control over how often your bookmarks are posted and how many bookmarks should appear on each post.
• If the post is not ready for prime time, Postalicious creates a draft with the pending bookmarks which you can publish any time.
• Full customization on the look of posts created by Postalicious.
• Integrates with WordPress tags.
• Filter the bookmarks that are posted to your blog depending on how you tagged them.
• Logs all the activity so that you know what Postalicious did and when.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Microsoft’s New Vista Ads Don’t Work
  Microsoft’s bait-and-switch campaign for Vista, the “Mojave Experiment,” is baffling. Why base a campaign around the core assumption that everyone thinks your product sucks, and that people who have felt wronged by Vista are ignorant fools?
• Oh happy day — the new Delicious is here
  Over the past few days we’ve been transitioning Delicious over to our new platform, quietly starting with RSS feeds and APIs. Today we’re taking the final step and flipping the switch on the new web site: delicious.com.
• Firefox market share exceeds 20%, Internet Explorer dips below 70%
  It has been six weeks since Firefox 3 has been released and it appears that Mozilla has had a successful launch with market share gains, especially at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

With this simple “hack” anyone can go from zero to 500, 5000, 50,000 subscribers in a single day!  Well, at least that’s what your Feedburner badge will say.  It’s quite obvious that you would be able to subscribe to your own feed and inflate your numbers but who’d have thought it could be this easy?

I may have a couple thousand subscribers by tomorrow .

Here’s the original article on TechCrunch.