Going Private

NEW BLOG ADDRESS:
www.mattbrookeandkids.blogspot.com

Hi everyone! If you would like an invitation to my new blog, please send me a quick email at b3_23@hotmail.com. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this is better for our family!

You must read this if you are thinking about going private - and I highly recommend going private on your blog. This happened to a friend of mine:

"I copied my previous statement about why I went private for anyone else who would like to know why:

I have SITE METER attached to my blog spot but unfortunately I have been really bad about checking it for unusual visiting sites this past year. To be honest, I have always been very trusting and thought that I could never be the one whom wackos actually target and stalk so I rarely have made efforts to check. Tonight I chose to click into it and directly on the first page I noticed an unusual website that had viewed my blog. Curiously, I clicked onto it to see what it was. The site contained dozens and dozens of images. I began looking closer at them and come to find out there were some VERY inappropriate pictures. I clicked out of the site immediately and sat there talking to [my husband] about my concerns. We both became VERY worried. The more I sat there, THE MORE SICK TO MY STOMACH I WAS. IF THIS PAGE HAD DIRECT AFFILIATION TO MY BLOG, THEN THAT MEANS THERE IS A GOOD CHANCE THAT THEY HAVE A PICTURE OF MY KIDS OR FAMILY ON THAT PAGE. With out hesitation, I went right back to that page. I was so scared of what I was going to find. There were hundreds of pictures on that page and I looked through each one very quickly but efficiently when all of a sudden I FOUND A PICTURE OF MY SWEET [daughter]. Yes, a picture of my sweet [daughter] on the same page as pornographic AND child perverted pictures. I then returned BACK to my site meter to look for other sites in direct affiliation with my blog. I found a different website that had come to my page 5 TIMES THAT INCLUDED A PICTURE OF [my son] WITH HIS LITTLE BUNS SHOWING AS HE WAS SITTING ON THE TABLE DOING DISHES. I'm just sick right now. My sweet innocent children so exposed. I FEEL SO VIOLATED AND SCARED.
I immediately googled the website BING to find out more about what it is. I then went to WWW.VOICEFORTHECHILDREN.BLOGSPOT.COM to see if I could find anything. Here is an explanation of what this website is.

BING:
BING is a recent search engine launched by Microsoft. The major problem with Bing is that it has brought pornography directly into your home or office. Porn is no longer a few clicks away.

When you search on Bing, you no longer have to click to go to a different website to view porn. All you have to do is roll over the thumbnail image of the video on the video will begin to play snippets of the pornographic video.

Imagine the harmful effects if a child is searching on Bing and merely rolls over the image and instantly the child is watching a porn video.

This is completely unacceptable and irresponsible of Microsoft to launch a program such as this without a solution to block pornographic videos.

DO NOT USE BING AND ESPECIALLY DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN SEARCH ON BING!!

*Do yourselves a favor and add VOICEFORTHECHILDREN to your blog. My uncle, Jeremy Geigle, is President of Arizona Family Council and between him and a few other family members, they are SO diligent about keeping this blog up to date. They want nothing more than to educate all of us on how we can keep our families safe and protected from the pornographic world.

As ruthless as it is, I hope I DID scare a lot of you. We stay so sheltered and ignorant thinking it will never happen to us...but let me tell you people, CHILD PORNOGRAPHY IS EVERYWHERE. Let me remind everyone too that Phoenix now is the #1 kidnapping capital in America.

*If you have kids old enough to play games on the computer, I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend that you download this web protection site to your computer. We have had it all year long, until our computer broke. We recently got our computer back and I forgot to re-download this protection, WHICH IS WHY I COULD EVEN ACCESS THAT BING WEBSITE WITH THOSE IMAGES.
I PROMISE you, having this K9 WEB PROTECTION is the BEST way as of right now, to protect your kids from seeing anything pornographic or inappropriate on the computer. Pornography is so available that even if your baby started slamming down on keys, a porn website could pop it.
Any porn sites, sites with questionable images, swim suit sites, facebook, youtube, and other social networking sites are ALL BLOCKED. It is VERY FILTERED.
HOWEVER, you will have an ACCESS password that will allow you (as the adult) to type in a password that will allow you to enter into a site you want available to you. You will have to type in the password every time you want to enter the site. (it's one extra step that is worth the 2 seconds).

I love knowing that I can walk out of the room now with my kids playing on the computer and I have NO concerns that something will pop up.

http://www1.k9webprotection.com/

Okay...this GOING PRIVATE situation has forced me to have to actually figure details out on Blogger...something I would have never taken the time to figure out before! I thought I'd share a couple tricks I've learned, in case some of you need to know! Thanks for everyone's help and pointers on how to figure these things out,esp Emily!!

1. HOW DO YOU MAKE YOUR BLOG PRIVATE, BUT STILL KEEP YOUR BLOG? (just like I did) It takes about 60 seconds...SUPER EASY.

Log onto your own blog. Then you go into SETTINGS, then the PUBLISHING tab. In there change your Blog Spot Address to something different. Anything that you want.

Then quickly create a new blog with your old address.

The new address will have all of your old posts. The old address will have nothing.

Change the NEW address (that has all of your old stuff) to a private blog.

And add a post to the OLD address stating that you are now private and if you want to be invited to view the blog to send you and email.


2. HOW CAN YOU INVITE MORE PEOPLE TO YOUR BLOG IF YOU RUN OUT OF INVITATIONS?

First, do you have another email account? You will need one. Make sure you invite yourself (your other email account self) to your blog. Open the email, and FORWARD that invite email to everyone else who wants to be invited. I seriously have no clue how it works but it will then create another list of readers on your PERMISSIONS page. You will see it all unfold when you actually do it.

...GOOD LUCK!"