My cousin (and others) made some good points on my going private post. I still am opposed to it for myself, and I think it's a royal pain in the butt when others do it, but I understand. Personally, I feel like it's giving into terrorists/wackos (though I'm sure many of you think by not going private it empowers them).
HOWEVER,
I have noticed in my blog tracker that people were being found through google searches. While I wouldn't mind being found, some people do. While I tried to take off last names per request, it's possible not everyone I read reads my blog or even knows I have their name listed. So, in an effort to not freak anyone out, I decided to eliminate all last names on my sidebar and take them down to initials. I never listed my location in my profile, but I will make more of an effort not to list it in posts.
I like being found by friends. (Maybe because it makes me feel popular--happy that people want to find me??) I like finding friends. I like seeing where people end up, who they end up with, and what their kids are like. It's interesting to see how people have grown and changed. I feel like I've changed a lot since high school, and I don't mind people knowing how I've changed. I have always been an open book and will continue to lay it all out. However, certain precautions are easy to take so I might as well take them.
I honestly don't mind if old rivals or boyfriends find me and read my blog. We're all adults now with lives of our own. Who cares what happened in grade school or high school? I guess some people carry that with them, but I've moved on. I don't hold grudges and have few regrets.
4 comments:
Good for you Celia! :) Change is a good thing, and being open is as well. It's nice to get to know people genuinely and I too am glad and get excited every time I find another friend from growing up. :) IT's fun. Love ya, V
I think it's wise to take precautions with a public blog. I've taken special care to keep our last name and specific neighborhood off (I even went searching through old posts to change as needed), and I try not to delve into unnecessary specifics. While I do like it when people happen upon my blog (I love that "loved and popular" feeling too...sort of makes up for lost time in high school when I felt like such a nerd), I don't usually like it when search engines point to it. Blake's cousin was able to set me up with a code which I inserted into my template which is supposed to keep search engines from crawling to my blog when people type in searches that are pretty unrelated to anything my blog has to offer, and so far it's worked very nicely. I like to keep tabs on my sitemeter as much as I can to make sure I have a general idea of who's getting to my blog and how. I think just keeping an eye on things does a great deal for safety.
Normally one would edit the robots.txt file to control the bots crawling your site. The following code which will disallow all sites from being index by all search engines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
However if you have a blogger account you aren't going to have access to this file directly. If you go to "Settings > Basic" and change "Let search engines find your blog?" to "No" then blogger will update your robots.txt file for you. For the curious, you can access this file by adding "robots.txt" to the end of your web address for your blog. For example:
http://down-the-middle-with-sillymarie.blogspot.com/robots.txt
Celia must have her settings "Let search engines find your blog?" set to "Yes."
You can also prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site, with the following meta tag place in your template or theme near the head tag if possible:
< META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
(note you wouldn't have the extra spaces at the beginning, that is just to trick blogger comments)
This means:
# NOINDEX - prevents the page from being included in the index.
# NOFOLLOW - prevents Googlebot from following any links on the page.
More information:
blogger guide - Understanding the robots.txt File
Inside Google Sitemaps: Using a robots.txt file
Webmaster Help Center
Some general thoughts:
Note that robots.txt don't always work (such as if spammers are crawling sites for email addresses) but it's better than nothing. If someone wants your information or content bad enough they are going to get/find it. And not to induce further cases of paranoia, but with sites like the wayback machine that cache sites for the annals of time, if something is out there it's out there forever. It's like the lower back tattoo- while you felt was a good idea at the time, might come back to haunt you later.
And if we are all worried about rivals or old boyfriends finding us online then we need to get new hobbies aside from blogging, say like scrimshaw.
Just a few nuggets you might find useful. :)
angie.
Thanks for the tip!
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