Perhaps you’ve noticed, if you’ve dipped into the site’s archives in recent weeks, but I’ve been working on another clean-up project around here. I wrapped it all up this morning.
A couple years back I stopped putting pictures of the girls on the site. Well, at least ones where you can clearly identify them. The idea being I wanted to reduce the chances for people to connect their names with a picture online. That could be just for their friends who were Googling them and ran across some silly baby picture as much as for anyone who might try to use that information for something truly dangerous.
(At the same time, I scrubbed the site of full names of all my readers and friends. Since then I’ve tried to use either first name, last initial, or just last name when referring to someone that is not in my immediate family.)
Well the latest project was to get rid of the girls’, and my wife’s, names completely. Again, this is just to protect their identities a little. I don’t want people able to search for their names, come across this site, and then read some story about one of them having a blowout when they were a baby, or throwing a fit when they were two, or other anecdotes that could be used to embarrass them. The likelihood that would ever happen is very small, but I wanted to reduce it to as close to zero as possible. I figure they’re getting old enough that they will have plenty of chances to shame themselves online on their own. They don’t need any help from pops.
Same thing for my wife. I doubt anyone would take the time to search this deep, connect this quasi-anonymous personal blog to her, and then use it to somehow harm her professional life. But again, I want to try to make those chances even smaller.
So, from now on, first initials only for my family. My regular readers know who everyone is. And any random passersby won’t miss any great context by not having full names.
And with that done – which involved manually searching through each post and then Finding/Replacing – maybe I can get back to a regular posting schedule finally.