For a little less than a year, we operated a multi-user blogging setup catering especially for blogging in the world of psychology, mind and personal experience. With 60+ themes, many specially modified to enable bloggers to display advertising on their blogs and earn money via Google AdSense, and with a custom-made revenue-sharing widget to enable bloggers to lay out their blog advertisements however they liked, our market research showed that we successfully leapfrogged the technology being offered by other 'niche' blogging sites dedicated to psychology and related fields. We also made a point of closing down the gaping security holes of which some other niche psychology blogging sites seemed blissfully unaware, and of regularly updating the WordPress Multi-User software system to ensure our users' privacy and security wouldn't be compromised. Most importantly of all, we took aggressive steps to stop the flow of blog spam whenever it started, while others offering this service (you know who you are!) just let it build up.
So we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves, and we were delighted to find that a user community of around 85 readers and writers quickly signed up and began crafting their blogs. All was well...except!
Except what? Except that staying on top of all those spam account creations, and all those software bugs that kept appearing in the underlying WordPress software system, proved to be too much for what we, as a small team, could sustainably handle. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right -- and doing it right was just taking too much of our limited resources. So, we notified our users, gave everyone plenty of time to backup and transfer their blog posts to other systems, and as of today, shuttered the site. (In case you're wondering, we recommend Blogger.com for our users; we strongly recommend against WordPress Multi-User systems due to the lack of comprehensive third-party security auditing of the underlying code. And naturally, we recommend against any of the niche psychology blogging platforms -- usually running WordPress, of course -- whose owners aren't sharing the advertising revenues with you!)
We wish all our ex-bloggers well at their new locations!
Sincerely,
The BlogsInMind.com Team
1 February 2008
P.S. If you're reading this and wondering about the domain itself, then yes, the domain itself may be for sale; drop us a line any time at: