Steve Fenton
Author of The Reason Your Website Sucks

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Monday, 12th July 2010

With blogging become ever more popular in the technology world, both in terms of sharing and finding new ideas or answers to common problems, now is a good time to highlight the importance of anonymising your blog posts.

You may have stumbled across something absolutely awesome while fixing a problem for one of your clients and you'll want to share it with the big wide world - but you may be surprised about how many pieces of information you may be giving away if you copy and paste a chunk of code into your blog. Not only this, but in your blog post, it is sometimes better to rename all of your fields and methods to make them contribute to the explanation of your article.

Even more importantly, all connection strings, file paths, magic tokens, secret words and abusive comments must all be changed or removed from any blog you post.

In some cases, you may not even own the intellectual property that you are discussing in your blog, depending on the contract between you and your client (this isn't an issue with your own code of course), so there is even more impotus on making sure you aren't sharing something you ought not to.

Have a check back through your blog now and remove anything identifiable in any code samples or blog articles!