Tuesday, August 4, 2009

WENT PRIVATE

NEW BLOG ADDRESS:
www.brettbrookeandkids.blogspot.com
I posted instructions below on how to have unlimited invites AND also how to make your blog private by making this page set up available (just like I did here!) VERY EASY INSTRUCTIONS DOWN BELOW.

Hello everyone! If you would like an invitation to my new blog, please email me at brookefmartin@gmail.com. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this definitely is working out better this way. Also, does anyone know how to expand the limit of invitations to people? I'm going private with out hesitation, but I'm not going to lie...I NEVER WANTED TO DO THIS FOR EVERY OTHER REASON!! My new blog address is only a mile long. If you want, you can make the change to your side bar. THANKS EVERYONE!
www.brettbrookeandkids.blogspot.com

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 Brett 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 TAYLIN. Yes, a picture of my sweet Taylin 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 RIDGE 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!

19 comments:

  1. Hi, I am a friend of Trisha's. I just feel so sick after reading what happened to you! I have wanted to go private with mine for awhile and now my mind is made up. I have a question though...how did you get your old blog to a new name? I don't want to lose any of my blog, but think maybe it would be easier to go private now and just have a new name for my blog. Can you help me out?

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  2. Please report them! If you are able to find the addresses again, or the visitors to your blog.

    "Forward the site address to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) at cybertipline.com. NCMEC will forward your report to the appropriate investigative agency for follow-up."

    So sorry that happened to you. I heard about it from Trisha too.

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  3. WOW. I mean WOW. I am going to go private for SURE now! I totally have little pics of my Megan with her booty on mine! Scary and creepy I am soooo glad you are doing this and getting the word out. You are the best and I will email you so I can get an invited to your adorable blog for sure! Oh and I DEF wana hang sometime for sure!:)

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  4. Brooke this makes me sick...I am so sorry this happened to your family. I would love to still keep in touch so pls pls pls invite me to your new blog.

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  5. I heard about this from Heidi and I feel sick for you. I starting blogging a year ago and went private after finding the same types of things from my sitemeter, which I still kept after going private. Thank you for sharing your experience and resources and may this help many in keeping our children safe. I'm glad you said that about Bing...I've been having problems on my computer with inapproriate things popping up and now I realize it stemmed from Bing being put on from the recent MSN change. I think we all need to complain to MSN as well since I have high security settings and this search engine Bing was still able to pop up pornography.

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  6. I am a friend of the Moore's and she recomended I read what happened to you. I am curious, did you make sure your blog could not only not be searched on blogspot but also could not be searched on any search engine?

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  7. You don't know me, but I am a friend of Shae Hansen's. I think you are very smart to go private and thanks for the added information. My friend found pictures of her little one on another site and this particular site was claiming to have her child up for addoption! and they had a bunch of freaks bidding on her as if they really had access to her....it was stomach churning. The pictures they had of her were from my friends blog. Safety is always more important then the amount of comments or views you may have.

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  9. Let's try this again: Thank you for the instructions! I followed them, but for some reason, my old blog (with nothing on it) is showing up 2 or 3 times on my dashboard...I tried to delete a few of them, but it acted as I I deleted it all together, and I don't want to delete it if people only remember the old address, and go there. Did this happen to you?

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  10. My sister came across this blog and shared it with me! Now I am scared that my family could have been invaded! Thank you for sharing this info with us!

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  11. Oh And I dont even know where to look to see if someone has taken pictures from our site!?

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  12. I thought I had posted a comment before, but it didn't show up...so maybe I didn't save it or something.

    Anyway, thank you so much for this information! My blog is already private, mostly because I wanted to be able to share a bit more with friends and family than what I wanted the general public to know. But even still...it makes me nervous! I'm so sorry that you had to go through all of this, and I hope that everything turns out okay for you!!

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  13. Thanks for helping me with my decision. I posted this page as a link on my "new" old blog, so that people could read this story and get scared into going private too. I hope that it's ok-I want all my friends and their families to be safe! Thanks again!

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  14. Okay! I'm totally going private now! Thanks for sharing your story (so scary!!!) and for the helpful hints - you're awesome Brooke! I hope you don't mind if I copy and post your story on my old blog to let my readers know why I'm going private? Thanks again!

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  15. Brooke I don't personally have a Blog though I have looked into creating my own since we have family in another site. I'm so glad you found out about these sites before something may have happened. God definitely was watcing over you and your family. I do thank God that you have posted this information and your unfortunate experience for others. I think most people think blogging is safe. The thing is that when you are on the internet, you are NOT alone and only a click away from danger and EVERYONE'S EYES or worse. I have several friends with personal/family blogs and I hope you don't mind that I sent it to my personal friends. May God Bless and be with you and your family.

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  16. Thank you so much for this information.
    At first, I was just so excited to be able to share pictures of our new precious baby girl with family and friends. She is now a year old and I feel like there is so much personal information on my blog about our lives. I put the "followers" gadget on my blog hoping that everyone who checks my blog would sign on. Of course, that doesn't happen. (I am pretty naive, I realize).
    I am so sorry to hear that you found those photos out there. It truly makes a person sick to hear it. I will make our blog private.
    THANK YOU A MILLION TIMES FOR POSTING ALL OF THIS. You have another friend in Internet land!
    Thank you!

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  17. You don't know me but I happened across your blog from Tayas... I'm sure glad I did. Thanks for the help on changing mine to private.

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  18. the reason phoenix is the #1 kidnapping for children in the country is because everytime A coyote takes an illegal across our state border it's considered a kidnapping...fyi!

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  19. Hi! I linked to your blog from a friends. I am wondering if you found the sites linking to your blog from google analytics or another site. I recently installed a visitor map onto my blog and was quite surprised to see visits from states where I dont know anyone that lives there!! Thanks for all this info.

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