Recently, my sister and I were having a conversation about having a blog for a pregnancy and/or a child (aka like Ian’s) and the question of security for a blog came up.

Jesse and I started this blog for Ian when we first decided on his name. I was only 20 weeks along in my pregnancy and I was finding a lot of things that I either wanted to share or remember. As Ian gets older, I’ve come to really love what I’ve managed to do with this site. I’ve been using it, not only as a way to keep family and friends appraised of Ian’s life, but as a journal of raising a child and going through a pregnancy. There was a lot of information that I obtained and I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember it all if we were to ever go through this again. I’m part of several Mom groups/discussion boards and I get so much information from them, that I like to have it all in one place. Plus, we’re still a young couple, so we meet a lot of people who are either just starting their families or have little ones but have questions. When they find out that we have a little one as well, we start trading stories or asking for advice from each other. I’ve given out this site a couple of times and others have found the information useful. That’s why I include it here. Not only will this information be here forever, but it’ll also be here when Ian starts his own family.

That’s the biggest reason why we started this site. We wanted Ian to have a record of his life, where he could find pictures, videos, and even comments from family and friends to all the important events in his life. When he gets older, we fully intend to give Ian access to this site (he’s a little young now). I’m sure he’s going to start contributing a lot sooner than we think, but he’ll have that option. He’ll be able to look back through his site in 10-20-30 years and see what he was doing and how we handled certain things. I personally would have loved something like this. There are a ton of things from my childhood that I have no memories of. I couldn’t tell you what we did for my 8th or 10th birthday, but Ian won’t have that problem. He’ll just have to search for it. I was going to create a scrapbook for Ian, but I don’t find it to be that important. I may do it at some point, but he’ll be able to get more out of his blog/journal than just looking at pictures.

You’re probably asking what this has to do with security and it’s easy….my sister and brother in law don’t want to do something like this because anybody would be able to see it. They want to be able to control who sees their journal and have some security with it. (For a little background information, my sister’s husband has to have a security clearance where he works, so he tends to think a little more about security in his personal life as well.) I’m not paranoid about people viewing this information. I put it up here so people WILL see it. We have friends who keep lookouts for videos, who like to see what Ian is doing without having to go through passwords. I’m not worried that some idiot will try to hunt down Ian for some nefarious purpose. I’m not stupid and I don’t post information that could easily be tracked to us, but nothing on the internet is ever completely secure. If you try to make it secure, you’re just painting a big bullseye on it. Even email isn’t safe. Everything can be hacked and information is always available for anyone who wants to look and have the means to do so.