One way you can take more control of your situation is to make your story public. It’s up to you as to how much personal information you choose to provide. Starting a website of your own is an excellent way to make your story public, network with others and show your support for TIs everywhere. Your website is a place where you can say anything you want and document your experiences -it’s a great place to post videos and pictures. Documenting your experiences on a website may even have the effect of decreasing harassment, as stalkers prefer to stay out of the spotlight.

On to some guides for getting a site up and running quickly for those of you who may not have tackled such a project before now. The first two options listed are for setting up a free blog, and the third is for setting up a site on your own hosting account, but first a few words about WordPress.

WordPress is an open source blogging platform that is perfect for managing a web site (blog or otherwise). As a web developer, I have built many sites using WordPress and find that it is the easiest platform for novice-advanced internet publishers. I recommend WordPress because it has some of the best plugins and a large support community (since it is an open source platform, it is not supported by the developers, but has a large support forum frequented by many web developers). There are thousands of free themes to style your site. With WordPress you can utilize many of the most popular web technologies, like widgets and video posting, etc.

The first two website options below, TI Collective blogs and WordPress.com blogs, are run on WordPress MultiUser which allows multiple users to each have their own blog. The third option is to host a WordPress site on your own hosting account. You can have your own site up in as little as 10 minutes.

TI Collective

Sign up for a free blog at http://gangstalkingjournal.com/blogs/ . TI Collective is a GangStalkingJournal.com project to provide targeted individuals with a platform from which to air their stories and document their experiences. Sign up now to get your own blog and access to several themes and other customization options.
Find out more…

Hosting your site on WordPress.com

The advantage to this option is that it’s totally free and you don’t have to mess with uploading files. The disadvantage is that there are only a few themes to choose from and your ability to customize your WordPress.com site is quite limited as compared to hosting your site yourself (or getting a blog here).
Find out more….

Hosting your site on your own web hosting account

The only disadvantages to hosting your site with a webhost provider is that you have to do some uploading of files and spend $6 or so per month for hosting. But if you can read and follow instructions this is the best route to take because you will be able to use any theme available (including your own custom theme) and generally have many more options to customize the layout and functionality. Using WordPress to run your site you will be able to add plugins for forums, image galleries… you name it.