Welcome to Invite Only!

If you are reading this, huzzah! You accepted my invitation to read my blog when it went invite-only, or… I don’t know how to make it invite-only. Either way, at least I have attempted to make this invitation only for security purposes. And I know that anyone reading this would likely already know why I decided to go invite only, but for those of you who have been asking, here are some security tips:

1. Know who is coming to your site and how. SiteMeter.com is great for this. You can see exactly how people are getting to your site (such as, someone else’s blog, a google search – and yes, you can see what they search, or Networked Blogs… etc). You can see what their entry pages are and what their exit pages are. Stuff like that. Another site that I also use is http://whos.amung.us/
2. Know what content is being copied, if any is at all. I use the site tynt.com for this. This is how I found out that someone was copying photos that I had posted back in 2009. It tells you what page they are copying from and what they are copying. According to Tynt, I had 9 images copied from my site in the past 30 days, two of which were just blog buttons, but the remainders were of Me, Benjamin, and my old rabbit.
3. Watermark your photos, but do it in a place where people can’t just crop it out or do a good photoshop job to get rid of the watermark. Make sure to make it so that if they really wanted to misuse your photos, they would have to put a lot of work into it.
4. I have heard that you can disable right and left clicks on your page. This would be useful… if there wasn’t such a think as a screenshot. I’m just sayin’… if someone wants your stuff and it isn’t THAT hard to get it, I am sure it wouldn’t be a big deal to open up paint and just take a screenshot. Also, some computers have snipping tools, which is just like taking a screenshot, except easier because you can select which part of the screen you want to save. So I mean, this would be great… but at the same time it isn’t the BEST security, you know?

Now, I’m not generally a paranoid person. I don’t know who was taking my pictures or for what reason. I don’t even know that they meant any harm by it. However, in February of 2010, I received two comments on my blog that freaked me out beyond belief:

Scary right? It turned out these photos were actually taken off of my facebook by someone I knew personally. It was a giant fiasco, and really was not something fun to deal with. I have tried since then to monitor who I am friends with, but it is hard to think that anyone could do this… again. But people do. I should probably go through my friends list again soon.

Basically I am saying, be careful. You are responsible for the information you put out there and I have heard that if you put it on the internet, you have no way to ‘get’ anyone for taking something of yours. Just be careful out there on the world wide web.