EdTech Avenue

I have recently considered creating a personal blog space.  I would love to have a place where I can post photos and daily news of goings-on with my husband and myself.  I do have a Flickr space with photos, but even while creating that last month I had to think twice about putting anything personal out there for the world to see.  I would like to share with family and friends things that are going on in my life… but I don’t necessarily want to share these things with my students.  This is a unique career we find ourselves in - my husband and his friends don’t have to worry about who might see their blog or want to “use it against them”.  But teachers do not have this same luxury.  I can only imagine the damage a scorned student could do to a teacher’s career - we’ve seen it on some news stories already.  But how much of this is paranoia and how much is warranted caution?

I know I could create a MySpace account (it’s not just for kids, you know) and protect it so that readers would have to register, but I don’t want my mom to have to get an account in order to read about me.  Is that unreasonable?  And I’m not sure I’d want to lock it so much that only family and friends can read it - I might want input from other adults, and students could create false accounts…

Is there any way to get general information out there in blog-type format while keeping it safe from my students?  I’m fairly new to this blogging thing, so any input is welcome.  I did find some possible solutions on WordPress using plug-ins, so I’ll have to give that a try.