What are your favorite cooking/baking blogs?

semi-private or secret personal blogs

• I used to be part of a group that blogged anonymously and read anonymous blogs through xanga, which effectively shut down a year or two ago. I really miss this community, as well as the opportunity to read these sorts of semi-private blogs. How can I find a similar community? Xanga allowed me to blog to a very select audience of people (in my case it was no more than 3-5 people) and also follow the blogs of a few people. I followed these blogs for almost a decade, and ended up making some good friends in the process. They weren't anybody special or famous or with any particular skills or remarkable lifestyle-- they just happened to match my demographic*. It was so nice to read material that isn't written with the number of comments/likes/views/retweets/whatever in mind, and to be able to limit my audience to a group of people who I trust will understand the context of my content. The most common way I would come across these blogs was through "blogrings." I recall there being a blogring called "I have a secret blog" and it consisted of semi-private diaries. I didn't follow the entire blogring, but I would browse the blogring from time to time to see if I liked any of the blogs fitting that genre. I don't find this arrangement be well replicated in Wordpress, which I believe lacks blogrings (but correct me if I'm wrong!). I suppose I could browse Wordpress by tags, but tags are sort of by definition publicizing, so somebody who was posting a semi-private personal blog might be harder to find via this approach. Does anyone know where this community went after xanga evaporated? Any suggestions for ways to find a community like this again? *Specifically, the community I belonged to could pretty much be summed up as "high-achieving sorta-secretly-unhappy Asian-American women, mostly in medicine," so if you know where this group hangs out online now, I want in!

• Answer:

  I posted about this for http://ask.metafilter.com/282768/Whats-the-social-media-now-for-LJ and none of the answers were quite the same, but what you're talking about with xanga could totally be redone on http://dreamwidth.org, which takes privacy pretty seriously. You'd have to reach out to the people you wanted to reconnect with and get things started, possibly just as a community. You could do a Facebook Group, but I find those bleed over to RL (there needs to be an acronym for RL-me online vs different me-online) too easily. I set up a https://tinyletter.com and randomly send updates off to a group of people from LJ, after I put a note about the tiny letter on my last LJ post. It's not close to the same, but it helped enormously a few times. A mailing list has a different feeling though from a blogging community because it's more of a circle than taking turns at a mike sorta.