**Update: A few of my friends informed me that there is an option I never knew about (I'm still not very tech-savvy, which makes me a traitor to my generation). I can make my blog available only to people who have my actual blog address, not search-able through a search engine. So I did that a few days ago, and now our viewers are back to normal. I'm going to keep it like this for awhile and monitor things. We might not have to go private if it stays like this. Thanks to the gals who taught me about it!**
So, in my opinion, it is pretty smart to have your blog be private. I never privatized our blog for a couple reasons; I know we have friends and family who read it and I don't realize they're reading it (for example: some of my great aunts, Jade's second cousins, etc.) thereby making it impossible for me to allow everyone access to our blog if it was private. Also when your blog is private, it won't show updates in your friends' blog lists, so no one can tell when you've done a new post. Personally, I always found this supremely annoying, so I kept ours public. This morning I read one of my friend's blogs, and she helped me become aware of a neat feature that Google has added to Blogger. You fellow bloggers will be interested to hear about this. In my Dashboard, there is a new button called "Stats". This tab allows me to see where my blog viewers are coming from (for example from another friend's blog, or typing in our blog address in Google, etc). It allows me to see what countries people are viewing my blog in, and which pages people have been viewing. It tells me what people have typed into a search engine to get to my blog. It was so fun to see that our friends in Canada checked our blog today, a couple of my friends who also have blogs checked our blog today, and it was fun to see that someone got to our blog by Google-ing me (I have never thought of myself as Google-worthy).
If you want to be scared, I mean really, truly scared, look at your "Stats" tab. For example, I have no idea why people in Turkey, Russia, New Zealand, or someone in Kazakhstan has looked at my blog 5 times in the last 24 hours. It was also enlightening to see what searches have brought people to our blog this week. One person arrived at our blog because they searched "edward cullien [typo obviously] aston martin", which was probably disappointing for them, but kind of funny to me. But I feel disgusted and violated knowing that someone came to my blog from Google with the search "she likes potty naked" and "potty she's naked again". I am sick about it. I had never thought that writing about potty training my child would be turned into something so disturbing for me. I don't think that those searches were meant to find us, because it wasn't a search for a child or anything child-related, but to think that someone who obviously has serious issues can come across our blog and read in detail about the last 3 1/2 years of our life, is incredibly disturbing.
So obviously now our family blog will be private. It is unfortunate that it has to be like this, because I know that this will make it harder for our loved ones to check up on us, but I feel there is no other option for us. I am only grateful that I came across this now, and not after something or someone harmed me or my family. If you would like to be allowed access to our blog when it becomes privatized, please email, Facebook, text or call me and give me your email address. You can also leave it as a comment in our comments section, and I will erase your email address right after I get it.
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