Aliases for Safety on the Net

So earlier this week, I was talking with my new friend @audcole at the #LRTweeties about blogging, children and “being safe” online with regard to kids. See when I first started blogging back in Fall 2008, I initially set up my blog to be protected, i.e., only viewable by permission.  I soon convinced myself that no one would easily happen upon my blog by searching, and I really wanted to make it easiest for people, like family for example, who might not be all that tech savvy. So I made the blog “unprotected.”  Since then, I’ve occasionally considered with a slight cringe that I use the kids’ real names on the net, but I always dismiss the thought and the cringe too quickly to really think about.  Once I started the website for the farm, and then decided to combine blogging with it, the issue of talking about the kids online became more prominent in my mind.  I know I want to encourage people to visit the farm website, which means more and more traffic to the site and more and more people I don’t know reading about my kids.

Then, the other day, @audcole, whose husband is a cop, and I were swapping blogging stories, and she explained that, while she doesn’t have kids yet, she has nieces and nephews who she writes about often.  She also explained that she never uses the real name of anyone who “doesn’t know” she’s writing about them.  We compared notes a bit on where we blog and what we blog about and I told her that I’d been starting to think I needed to remove my kids’ names from the website but that I had posts going back almost two years.  Then she said, you know, on WordPress I think you can do something like that pretty simply. She was right.

I think I’ve gotten the kids’ names successfully removed from all prior posts and other pages of the website and replaced with the following aliases: The Girl, Boy Genius and Wonder Boy.  I’ll explain more about these aliases in future posts (and will link them here when I do), though I think who’s who is pretty evident to anyone who actually knows the kids. 🙂

I already feel better about promoting the farm website and my blog.  Thanks @audcole! Because it’s possible I missed some, I ask this:  If you’re a family member or friend or anyone else surfing the site or reading posts and you notice a reference to one of the kids by name, I’d appreciate you letting me know.  Thanks in advance.