Flavius Popan

Stealth Mode on bearblog.dev

While I want this site to serve as my professional portfolio for the whole internet to see, I also want to share private content only with family & friends. But I don't want them to have to create a login, use a password, or do anything else besides clicking a link.

I want security through obscurity.

So I emailed Herman with the question and he got back to me (nearly instantly!) with the following advice:

The Easiest Way

Just share an unpublished draft, the URL will contain a unique token (?token=XXXXXX) required to view the page. This works really well for short-lived content like an event invite. The downside is that it's pretty easy to accidentally publish a draft instead of hitting "Save as draft" every time, and the URL isn't as pretty as it could be.

The More Robust Way

  1. Set the published_date to the far future (like 2125). This keeps the page/post out of sitemap.xml.

  2. Set make_discoverable: false to prevent content from appearing in the Bear Discovery Feed.

  3. Exclude crawlers with wildcards in robots.txt. Since bearblog.dev doesn't (yet) allow adding directories to the root path, you can use wildcards to target URL patterns. Ex:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /hidden-*

As long as the link prefix starts with hidden-, you're golden!

#personal