Ok, major dork detour here. If you aren't into blog software, then keep moving.

Nothing is ever really hidden on the Internet. Secret memos get out, personal information is revealed, and other such fun. I've been wanting to post some pages here on my site but hide them from blosxom, the blog software I use. Sure, I could just toss up some html pages outside of blosxom's control, but I wanted to use the features of blosxom, like the templates and the various plugins I have installed. The pages wouldn't really be secret, just not presented as a blog story or visible in the categories listing.

After some poking at the various plugins, I used the combination of these two plugins:

• exclude
• categorylist (which I already had installed)

Refer to the blosxom site for the location of the plugins or you can also refer to the website of the Unofficial Blosxom User Group.

I got the files from these locations, but can't vouch for these locations being valid in the future:

• http://blosxom.ookee.com/blosxom/plugins/v2/exclude-v20060102
• http://blosxom.ookee.com/blosxom/plugins/v2/categorylist-v0i2i5

exclude allows you to create an exclusion file containing the file or directory name patterns (regular expressions) that should be excluded from the blog.

categorylist provides the list of posting categories (blogs, music, etc) that you see in the sidebar of this blog and many others.

Install each plugin in your blosxom plugin directory, preferably one at a time, followed by the verification that you haven't broken anything with the plugin.

Since these are to be rarely used pages, I created a directory called 'static' in the blosxom data directory, where the rest of my stories and category directories live.

In the static directory, create the file that excludes this directory from category listings:

$ touch static/category.exclude

Now, to keep the posting from being seen by blosxom and presented as a new blog post, create the exclusions file and add the pattern which matches your file or directory name. The contents of my file shows that I want to exclude any posts that have the pattern 'static/' in the file path:

$ cat exclude_patterns
static/

The location of the exclude_patterns file is configured in the exclude plugin itself.

Voila! Any posts placed in the static directory are not presented as blog postings which effectively makes the hidden from most viewers. It then takes direct knowledge of the URL to access the page.

This is, of course, not a valid method for hiding information from the all-knowing Internet.