Private blog or journal for guitar learning progress

May 15, 2017 3:35 PM

I just started learning guitar and want to document my progress with notes and videos week by week as a motivational tool. But where to post my content?

I'd like to be able to post quick notes and videos from my phone to a private blog/channel/journal somewhere as I progress through learning, and hopefully will be able to document some improvement! Requirements:

1. I'd like it to be private, as it's just for my own interest. Might be nice to be able to open it up later on, or allow people to see specific entries, but that's secondary.

2. As quick and easy as possible to post things to - in practice this probably means the ability to share media from my (Android) phone to an app

I tried setting up a private Facebook group with just me in it, even though that seemed like overkill, but you have to have at least one other person in the group! I know it's possible to post content to my own timeline with the privacy setting of "only me", but 1) it's far too easy to forget to change the setting, and 2) it would be awkward to look back through it in future as it would be mixed in with my other timeline posts.

Is there an obvious solution that I'm not thinking of? There must be some straightforward, uncomplicated blogging or journaling platform that would fit the bill, but I haven't blogged since the days of Movable Type and I don't know what's around now.

posted by bent back tulips to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

YouTube has all the features you need.

1) You can make uploads private
2) You can sort videos chronologically
3) You can upload directly from your Android.
posted by joebakes at 3:42 PM on May 15, 2017

Response by poster: Not to threadsit but I'd like the ability to have text-based notes as well as just videos, otherwise YouTube would suit pretty well.
posted by bent back tulips at 3:49 PM on May 15, 2017

Wordpress allows you to have a private blog. I've used it. If you happened to tell anyone the URL, which you won't, they would see a message saying the blog is private. Wordpress is incredibly easy to use with one of their templates and using it from a phone has worked fine for me.
posted by AppleTurnover at 5:35 PM on May 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

Not to threadsit but I'd like the ability to have text-based notes as well as just videos, otherwise YouTube would suit pretty well.

You can write text in the caption of a YouTube video. So you could do this all just on YouTube.

Or you could do private YouTube videos and embed them in a private blog.

Blogger is a decent service that lets you limit your blog to a list of readers; you could put only yourself on the list. (Click here and scroll down to "Choose who can see your blog.")

I don't have an Android, so I don't know about how to do this on your Android. But there are Blogger and YouTube apps for Android, and my guess is that you can easily copy the "embed" code for a YouTube video and paste it into a Blogger post. Blogger and YouTube are both owned by Google, so I'd be surprised if they didn't make this reasonably easy.

If you do use Blogger, I recommend putting "labels" (tags) on each post so you can easily go back and look at all your posts focusing on a certain aspect of guitar playing. For instance, you could have labels for "chords" and "scales," and also add labels for more specific aspects like "barre chords" and "open chords," or "pentatonic scales" and "modal scales."
posted by John Cohen at 9:45 PM on May 15, 2017

I'll second wordpress.com. I keep a private blog there. I've not used YouTube's private video option, but it seems like it would work. The base level for wordpress is free. I believe that you can pay extra for video uploading on wordpress.com if you want to. There is an android app for wordpress, though I haven't used it in a long time, so I can't speak to how good it is. You can make the blog public anytime you want.
posted by kathrynm at 8:35 AM on May 17, 2017