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Anonymity And The Blog Feeds

Some blog owners have found out, to their dismay, that the blog feeds contain details about them, that they supposedly blocked from their blogs.

Blog owners, who are trying to publish blogs anonymously, have to work hard, to stay anonymous.

When you setup a new blog, you'll have a number of tasks, to remain anonymous.

If your blog uses a non dynamic template, you can carefully remove gadgets like "About Me" / "Profile", which may contain information that you don't want seen by the public. If you look at your blog, using a dynamic template - or in a feed listing - you'll see the details, that you thought had been removed, when you deleted the gadgets.

The sensitive content, like your name, is one detail which Blogger Engineering thought was being hidden, when they decided to prevent reader chosen switching from a non dynamic template to a dynamic template - in the cause of "privacy issues".

The immediate solution is to change the Blogger profile content, and remove your name and other details. But having done that, you'll find that the blog feed does not get updated, when the profile is edited.

To update feed content, in the blog, you have to shut down and restart the feed - and make changes with the feed shut down.
  1. Disable the feed, on the blog, using Settings - Other - "Allow Blog Feed".
  2. Set "Blog Readers" to "Private", using Settings - Basic - Permissions.
  3. Edit the profile, and change "Display name".
  4. Set "Blog Readers" to "Public".
  5. Re enable the feed.
  6. Publish a post.
  7. Disable the feed (if you decided it's not needed).

With the feed cleaned then refreshed, you have the best chance of feed content, in cache on your subscribers computers, being updated with your new, non sensitive details.

If you were going to shut down your feed, as in Step #7, you might wait a period of 2 to 4 times as long as you normally take between posts, following Step #5. That would give you a better chance that all current readers might update their cache, and flush out all previously published sensitive content, previously in your feed.

Of course, you might publish one last post, informing your subscribers why you are shutting down the feed.

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