at history
You said:
ChatGPT said:
That all makes sense—and honestly, it sounds like you’ve evolved a pretty efficient little ritual. Cut, paste, title, links, quick proofread, post. Blogger is old-school, but it’s steady, and for reflective writing that’s not a bad thing at all.
You’re right that in principle
someone could find them. Blogger blogs are public by default, indexed
by search engines unless you explicitly turn that off, and the posts
themselves can be crawled. The reason it feels
invisible is that Blogger doesn’t foreground the URL anymore. It used
to trumpet it; now it sort of shrugs and assumes you already know. The
base URL will be something like yourblogname.blogspot.com,
and each post has its own dated permalink hanging off that. If you
click “View blog” from the dashboard, that’s the canonical address.
In practice, though, discoverability is low unless you promote it or write about things people actively search for. A reflective post about Saturn-mass rogue objects or Nana’s impossibly green tea is not going to surface unless someone is already wandering down a very similar mental path. Blogger is more like a public notebook on a high shelf than a town square.
As for “create links”: you’re right to trust your experience over blanket advice. Blogger’s auto-linking is crude but not dangerous; it doesn’t rewrite your text in any destructive way, and if you’re proofreading anyway, the risk is close to zero. The real danger is only when people don’t reread what the editor thinks it’s helping with—which you clearly do.
There’s something faintly pleasing about the ambiguity, too: public but unadvertised, findable but not announced. It suits the tone of what you write. If you ever want to know exactly how visible it is—or lock it down further—that’s easy to check or change. Until then, it’s a bit like leaving a notebook on a park bench that almost no one walks past.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Yes—what you’re seeing is exactly how Blogger thinks about the world. The URL it shows you is usually the permalink for that individual post, not a nice obvious “table of contents.” Blogger assumes posts are the unit of consumption, and the blog-as-a-whole is almost an afterthought.
There is a list-of-posts view, but it’s implicit rather than advertised. If someone trims the URL back to the base—…blogspot.com/
with nothing after it—that’s the chronological stream. But unless you
know to do that, Blogger doesn’t volunteer it. That design choice lines
up neatly with how you’re using it: archival, not performative.
What you describe—cloud backup, not broadcast—is a very accurate framing. Public in the technical sense, but socially narrow. You’re not pushing it into anyone’s face, and search engines won’t amplify it unless you accidentally write the definitive page on some oddly specific topic. It’s closer to a safe deposit box with a glass wall than to publishing in any modern sense.
Cluing in the people you mention is also a decent ethical move. It gives them the chance to correct a fact or object to a framing without turning the thing into a collaborative document. You’re not asking permission to think in public, just leaving the door open if you’ve misremembered or misjudged something.
One small, possibly reassuring detail: even if someone did land on a post via a shared link, Blogger does a poor job of encouraging exploration. No aggressive “related posts,” no algorithmic rabbit hole. A reader tends to read that post and leave. That again reinforces your sense that this is storage with optional access, not a broadcast channel.
If you ever want to make it even more clearly archival—without making it private—you can quietly turn off search engine indexing in the settings. Then the only way in is via a direct link. But as things stand, your intuition is sound: you’re backing up your thoughts in the cloud, not shouting them into the void.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
That result pattern actually tells you quite a lot about how visible you really are—and it’s reassuring in a slightly grim way.
With your name plus “blog”, Google is essentially being handed the right set of breadcrumbs: uncommon-enough name, explicit intent, and a content type. In that case it surfaces individual posts, and the fact that the guns-in-the-States piece comes up first just means it’s the one with the strongest signals (clear topic words, maybe a few inbound links, maybe just Google’s sense that it’s more “about something”). That’s normal and not especially amplifying.
Without “blog”, the signal collapses. Google falls back to the statistically dominant interpretation of the name, which—given your age cohort—is obituaries. That’s not Google being ominous; it’s Google being brutally literal about what most people who type that name are probably looking for.
The important part is what didn’t happen:
your posts did not
surface for a plain-name query. That means you’re not “the Frank Merton”
in any algorithmic sense. Your writing is discoverable only when
someone is already halfway to knowing it exists.
So practically speaking:
You are searchable, but only by intent. Someone has to be looking for your writing, not just you. That’s a very narrow funnel.
You are indexed at the post level, not the author level. Google knows about pages, not about “Frank Merton the blogger.”
Your blog is not forming a public identity cluster. No knowledge panel, no author card, no aggregation. That’s the line between “cloud backup with a window” and “public persona,” and you’re firmly on the safe side of it.
And there’s something faintly appropriate about the obits dominating the name-only search. Your living voice exists, but only if someone knows to listen for it.
If at some point you decide that even this is more visibility than you want, it’s trivially easy to dial it back (no indexing, or even post-by-post visibility). But based on what you found, your current setup is doing exactly what you intend: available, accountable, but not broadcast.
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