Advice invited -- Seeking an encrypted blog.

[playground]

Hi there,

The two blogging sites i've looked at so far (Blogger.com - owned by google,
and LiveJournal) both have facilities for making your posts public, friends
only or private.    And i've just started peeking at the blog on Wordpress.com.

I  decided i might want to have a private blog, and maybe try to get into the habit
of writing to it regularly, daily, or at least, multiple times per week.

But also get into  the habit of writing, as far as possible, an "honest" blog,  and
write it for me, to me.  So.. no hindrance, or less hindrance, of making it sound
'reasonable' or 'justifiable' or 'socially acceptable' to a 3rd party audience.
The idea is honesty and insight. 

Whilst i was playing around with google's 'blogger.com' settings it offered me a
choice between http and https .. and then i realised... if  I did create a post that was
honest and self-revelatory (hence sensitive data).. that data, that post,
would inevitably be sat around in plain english on some computer somewhere...
actually that same data could be copied to N number of computers en route
between the client and server boxes.

So that made me think that i needed to find a blogging website that would
encrypt the data
(a) at my client (for transmission to the server)
(b) at the server (so it's not sat on disc somewhere in plain english)
So it's basically an encryption rich blogging website.
(maybe not a free service..)

So ...

question 1 is:  Do you know of any encrypted blogging websites (free ones) ?

question 2 is:  What blogging site/software would you personally recommend ?

And.. i now realise...

As very often happens when you sit down, describe a situation and specify a
question:  the answer somehow magically pops out of the ether.
   
I think, probably, a better solution for my 'private blogging' needs...
Is to get a free encrypted email service...   and send myself 'mediation
journal' updates, as emails....  from me, to me.

protonmail.com is a free encrypted email service.
On protonmail, you have to specify a mailbox encryption password
as well as an account password.  And when you send emails to another
protonmail account (like your own) then the data is encrypted prior to
encrypted transmission.

So what have i learned ?
I don't need a blog, not for my honest and private, journalling needs.
so i can stop wasting my time doing this compare and contrast stuff.

What have you learned ?
Maybe i've given you a good idea for how to do you own private journalling.
Maybe i've told you something useful about protonmail.com.

However, i'd still like to hear about your views on blogging.
And if there is a free encrypted blogging website.. i'd like to learn of that
too.  Perhaps knowledge of this will be useful in the future.

best wishes

[Matthew]

You don't need a blog, or an email account, I'd suggest you use a password protected LibreOffice document on your hard-drive upload it to Google Drive if you want a safe copy. Or a good old paper journal ... there is something very useful about not being behind a screen.

riseup.net is another encrypted mail service .. it will automatically encrypt mail between riseup protonmail and other encrypted mail services.

[playground]

You don't need a blog, or an email account, I'd suggest you use a password protected LibreOffice document on your hard-drive upload it to Google Drive if you want a safe copy. Or a good old paper journal ... there is something very useful about not being behind a screen.

riseup.net is another encrypted mail service .. it will automatically encrypt mail between riseup protonmail and other encrypted mail services.

Yes.. google drive and/or dropbox.  I think dropbox has a 'encrypted storage' option.
And of-course, if the journal is in a document, or series of documents, i can make use
of the search functions ---

One of my 'compare and contrast' tests for the blogs was, say i wanted to locate a
journal entry in which i last referred to 'enlightenment'.  And that the journal entry is 2 or 3
months old.  How would i search for it.

This turns out to be surprisingly problematic for LiveJournal (or.. i just couldn't figure it out)
My conclusion after fiddling around and search the FAQ is that you can search for tags
but you can't search for arbitrary strings (in your own private-access journal pages)
Searching in others' public pages, however, is straightforward.

If i kept my journal as a series of unique, password protected documents, say a document
per day, or per week, or per month... and i wanted to  search for the entry that contained
'enlightenment' .. then i guess i'd have to open each document, save them all unencrypted
to my local drive, then do a:   'grep enlightenment *.odt'

keeping journal entries in either emails, or in a wiki... would be easier because wikis
and mailboxes are typically engineered to facilitate searching...   But finding an
encrypted wiki, is probably as difficult as finding an encrypted blogging site.

Yes.. i have a riseup.net  account already, i used it a lot when i was learning about
encryption.. i ended up preferring the facilities of openmailbox.org..  but these days, 
i just use protonmail.ch... and i think my public keys have probably expired now.
but i digress... 

Thanks Matthew.
 

[playground]

actually... scratch that.  Protonmail stores all the email message bodies, encrypted, on the server.
So you cant do a simple search to recover, for example, 'enlightenment' mentioned 2 months ago.

As batman would say 'drat!'

[playground]

There's a very useful 'desktop wiki' called zim.

Normally, "feature rich" often translates, in reality, to:
"too flexible, too many options,... it's no longer intuitive, too  complicated"
However this thing is very simple to use...  so i'm pleased i found this.

It's a wiki so you can search it exhaustively.

It has some handy features:

=> it has a calendar feature and a journalling plugin..
so that it can auto create dated pages..

=> It has a task listing functionality so you can specify
jobs and TODO lists in your journal/diary and the task
functionality will search and collect all the outstanding jobs.
That's handy if you want  to populate your journal/diary with
reminders and jobs -- and have the wiki remember them for  you.

=> It's a 'desktop wiki' meaning it's not published publically on a
webserver and doesn't require a webserver, but if you want to export
your journal/wiki pages to  html you can... in fact, it will
start a baby webserver so you can see how those pages would look.

=> It also has a latex plugin so  you can design write pages and
then export them to latex format... handy if you're a LaTex user.

=> The pages are all stored as simple text files in a folder in your
home directory .. . something like ~/zimJournal
So that folder can tarred, or zipped. 
Using 7z you can password protect that data if you want  to.
Periodically you an push this file to dropbox or google drive.

=> It has a version control plugin so that you can always
restore previous work if you happened to  somehow delete
content.

=> And finally, zim can be configured to run off a USB stick.
An _encrypted_ USB stick if you want to.
So you can take it with you, on holiday, travelling abroad,
to the office...  etc.   You're not tied to your home computer.

Zim works on linux and windows and various flavours of Mac
(Zim has active developers working on it - so  if you find a bug
or want a feature adding.. you can simply ask for it)

For anyone that's interested there is more information here:
http://www.zim-wiki.org
Of-course.. it's free.