Privacy and Permissons

Image from Theedublogger.com

When setting up a new blog, one of the things you will need to decide is whether you want the things you post to be public or private. One of the reasons many people write blogs is to establish a sense of community.  However, depending on the nature of the information you will be posting, you may choose to restrict who is allowed to see it.

The default if you do nothing is for your blog to be public.

Image from Gingerbread Marketing

In some cases you may want to open your blog only to a specific group of people.  Many years ago I set up a blog that was used for work collaborations.   It was open only to the faculty working at the college where I used to be employed as we teamed on a particular curriculum review project. That blog allowed our team to share ideas and review one another's notes even though we all had very different schedules and worked at different campuses.  Being able to work together from various locations made the few face-to-face meetings we did have far more effective.

image from Teamwork.com

In other situations you might was a limited access blog if you are working with a mentor who will review your content and make suggestions.  Or, you might want to share information that is only available to your family. Whatever the group, you can set who is invited and who isn't.

You can also set your blog as completely private so you will be the only one to ever see what you are posting.  This is how some people choose to keep journals.  Or, you may want to keep your work restricted for a certain period of time and then open it up later.

image from Seton.com

To change privacy settings, follow these steps.

1)   From the front page, or public view of your blog, click on the "Design" tab on the top right hand side.

2) From the "Dashboard" page where all the design takes place, click on "SETTINGS" from the menu on the left hand side.

3) Next, set the Privacy and the Permissions

If you need further clarification on this, here are some resources:
(Click on links below to review these sites)

Control access to your blog (Google)

Change your blogger privacy settings (YouTube)

How to make your blog private and restrict access in blogger (bloggerlab)

A few words about virtual relationships:

When I wrote my first blog back in 2006, my intention for it was simply to be a way to share photos and news of my family with relatives and friends who lived in various parts of the country that I did not get to visit with in person very often. I did not bother with privacy settings at the time since I assumed no one who did did not know me personally would have any reason to look at it. I am not a professional writer.  I was not doing anything all that exciting or remarkable.  I merely wrote short essays about my life, describing my efforts to  balance work and raising a family in the Pacific Northwest.

As it turned out, most of my intended audience rarely looked at that blog.  If my family wanted to know how I was doing, they would call or email.  However, the click counter I had set up on the pages showed that plenty of people were looking at it.  As it turned out, most of my traffic on that blog came complete strangers That was the biggest surprise of my blogging experience.
Some found my blog from google searches for words that were somewhere in my content.

Some found it from seeing comments I left on other blogs and clicking on my name. Others heard about it from mutual friends.  Now, over ten years later, I remain "virtual friends" with some of those early blog readers.  We have gotten acquainted by reading each others' posts, sending private emails, and in some cases annual Christmas cards.  Over the years we have shared news of our families, book recommendations, recipes, life advice and sympathy in times of trial.  We genuinely care about each others' well being.  However, we have never actually met.

While building a community online can be very rewarding in many ways, you need to use  common sense.   Recognize that some people may present themselves online very differently than their actual identity in real life. Unfortunately, there are those who will deliberately entice people into online "friendships" in order to gain their trust in order to commit fraud or otherwise exploit the situation. Use caution before ever agreeing to meet someone in person or giving them your address.   NEVER give anyone you meet online access to your user name or password for any account or any other personal information and be sure you do not allow any online friendships to interfere with your real life world.