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. Â 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.” Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â She also explained that she never uses the real name of anyone who “doesn’t know” she’s writing about them. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â Thanks @audcole! Because it’s possible I missed some, I ask this: Â 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. Â Thanks in advance.
[…] on my previous post Aliases for Safety on the Net, meet “The Girl.” Â She’s our ultra-girley, uber-sensitive and undoubtedly […]
[…] on my previous post Aliases for Safety on the Net, meet “Boy Genius.”  He’s our precocious middle child who, I’m fairly […]
[…] on my previous post Aliases for Safety on the Net, meet “Wonder Boy.”  He’s the baby of the family and clearly knows it. […]
[…] My husband Bryan and I have been married for 13 years and we live on a farm in north-central Arkansas.  We have 3 children, 3 dogs, 2 rabbits, a growing number of dairy goats and too many chickens to count. Our children are: The Girl, age 11; Boy Genius, age 9; and Wonder Boy, age 4-1/2 (names have been changed to protect the sometimes innocent — see post about Aliases). […]